[syslinux] Unbootable machine

Kim Mik kimmik999999 at yahoo.co.uk
Mon Jun 1 10:50:31 PDT 2009


fbinst is an attempt from a grub4dos developer to make "every" USB stick bootable.
Some BIOSes even skips a certain number of sectors at the beginning of the stick.

It only works for Windows AFAIK (at least for the moment).
For more information see: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=7932

You can download  fbinst from: http://download.gna.org/grubutil/

Gert Hulselmans




----- Original Message ----
From: H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com>
To: Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org>
Cc: Development discussions related to Fedora Core <fedora-devel-list at redhat.com>; Jeremy Katz <katzj at redhat.com>; Sugar Devel <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>; syslinux at zytor.com
Sent: Monday, 1 June, 2009 8:39:47
Subject: Re: [syslinux] Unbootable machine

Bernie Innocenti wrote:
> Hello Peter & Jeremy,
> 
> I've found an ordinary desktop PC (with Phoenix Award BIOS 6.00PG) that
> won't boot off a USB stick created by livecd-tools-024 with syslinux
> (tested both versions 3.75 and 3.81).
> 
> The boot process drops to the "boot:" prompt with an error message:
> 
>   could not find kernel image: linux
> 
> The same USB stick boots fine on any other computer I could find.
> Does it seem like a syslinux bug?  And if turns out to be a known BIOS
> bug, is there a good workaround?
> 

I need much more details; *all* Award BIOSes make in the past 10-12
years have version number 6.00PG.

Also look for how you have configured your BIOS... some Award BIOSes
have USB-ZIP, USB-HDD, USB-FDD configurations; you generally want USB-HDD.

There are some BIOSes which will boot from USB *only* if it was
formatted with 64 heads, 32 sectors; apparently due to some odd notion
that only zipdrives would be USB.

    -hpa

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

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