[syslinux] "Boot error" message

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 08/12/2009 04:37 AM, Oleg V. Koshkin wrote:
> During the test process I tried to shutdown the mashine properly and with
> the reset button. But the both ways cause this error from time to time.
> The version of mke2fs is 1.41.3.
> I boot from the Disk On Module. But I don't think the error caused by the
> flash memory. Maybe something wrong with the filesystem because it is
> journalling?

If you have /boot on a journalled filesystem (ext3/ext4), there is a
failure mode where you can have an unclean shutdown (crash) after new
boot files are installed but early enough that the journal hasn't been
flushed.  Right now all the bootloaders I know of treat ext3 as ext2,
meaning they ignore the journal.

However, "Boot failed" is something entirely different.  It is a very
early error message indicating that the bootloader itself couldn't be
read from disk.  What that means is that the BIOS refused to read a
sector from your boot medium at least six times in a row, *or* is
corrupted the contents in one of several ways.

In either case, you are almost certainly looking at either a hardware
failure, or a BIOS/DOM interaction -- for example, your BIOS might have
a timeout in it that the DOM doesn't meet.  Your statement "I don't
think the error caused by the flash memory" sounds like wishful thinking
not actually based on any data.

	-hpa

-- 
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel.  I don't speak on their behalf.