[syslinux] vesamenu partly broken in 3.70?

lurker lurker at lavabit.com
Sun Jul 20 18:27:30 PDT 2008


Hi,

As of syslinux-3.70, vesamenu.c32 seems to be broken. But here's the
kicker: it's only broken when booting from USB, not from CD!

What happens is that the colours are not set like I've set in the cfg
and only one entry shows up. On my laptop that entry contains some
really messed up symbols but on my stationary computer it's just empty,
so it seems we're dealing with some memory issues here. On both systems
pressing ENTER shows a password prompt although I have configured no
such thing. Pressing ESC brings me to the usual boot prompt which works
just fine.

But as I said, when I boot from CD on the same systems with the same
homebrew Linux distro and syslinux/isolinux cfg the vesa menu works.

Simply swapping out vesamenu.c32 with one from 3.63 or earlier versions
fixes the issue on USB, and that's the reason why I think that's the
culprit. Or could it be something with my procedure of installing and
configuring syslinux on USB? What I do is basically the following which
I think is standard:

First I copy over the relevant content from the CD image to the bootable
USB partition, then I do:

dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=${USB_DEVICE}
syslinux ${USB_PARTITION}

I'm not sure what other info or specs I should post in order to help
troubleshooting this, so please tell me. The problem feels quite strange
as I didn't expect the vesa menu to behave all different when run from
USB compared to CD, but what do I know.

Cheers!






More information about the Syslinux mailing list