[syslinux] FW: Boot Error" on random machines

[H. Peter Anvin]

Sergii Kolisnyk wrote:
> 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... :(
> 

That's not the important part of zipdisk geometry.  The important part 
is 64 heads, 32 sectors.

The Syslinux MBR supports booting from logical partitions, but that's 
not really an issue.

	-hpa