[syslinux] FW: Boot Error" on random machines

[Sergii Kolisnyk]

2008/8/27 H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com>:
> Jack Peirce wrote:
>>
>> I've read that this might be caused by faulty bios, and that a possible work around is making e usb stick's disk geometry to be that of a USB-ZIP drive. This however, loses persistence which is absolutely necessary for our system.
>>
>
> "Loses persistence?"  What do you mean?

I suppose that them have no writable partition at ZIP geometry.
There is the only partition, /dev/sda4, and it's mounted readonly.

IMHO, it may be possible (if having more primary partitions doesn't work)
to chain extended partition into 4th slot, and to have all partitions logical.
But then we need 'chain-mbr' code to boot; as I remember (may be
my memory is wrong) only OS/2 was capable of booting from logical partition.
I don't know if it works for current mbr versions to just write a copy
of mbr code to
extended partition mbr. May be code which could both be primary mbr and also
chain through the chain of extended partitions can't fit... :(