[syslinux] Failure to boot isohybrid image from USB stick

[Sergey Vlasov]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 07:02:24PM +0200, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
> I am currently trying to find out how
> the parasite BIOS gets started and whether
> i can disable this without touching the
> shaky hardware. They call it "BIOS" not
> "bootloader".

The BIOS setup should have an option to disable the Promise
controller; its BIOS extension should go with it.

> 
> At least with the BIOS in question it seems
> to be about isohybrid, not about hardware
> detection. (Although unpacking RIP's archive
> lasts about 10 minutes which is absolutely
> not normal. USB hardware is 2.0. Shrug.)

Which step takes 10 minutes?  If it's loading rootfs.cgz by syslinux
(printing lots of dots in the process), the problem is a crappy BIOS
which does not support high speed in the legacy emulation module;
nothing can be done about this, except reviving the old
"non-initramfs" booting mode present in some old riplinux releases
(when the BIOS was used to load only a small initrd, which then loaded
the main archive using proper Linux drivers).
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