[syslinux] Memdisk + Freedos problem

[Kim Mik]

I and some other people have problems with running the freedos image included in
Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD), when using memdisk for floppy emulation.

Memdisk starts booting the image and freedos shows the following menu:

0 Boot Clean
1 Boot UMBPCI (silent)
2 Boot UMBPCI (optimal)
3 Boot UMBPCI (semi-defensive)
4 Boot EMM386 (optimal)
5 Boot EMM386 (semi-defensive)
6 Boot no UMB (defensive)
7 Boot no UMB (ultra-defensive)


0 Boot Clean
____________

  Works fine.

1 Boot UMBPCI (silent)
____________________

  It prints:

==========================================================
FreeDOS HIMEM64 3.26 [Aug 25 2006] (c) 1995, Till Gerken 2001-2005 tom ehlert
HIMEM - Fast A20 method used
UMBPCI c't 11/95 - Siering/Schäpers/Stiller
V3.77 - support for new chipsets, Inter PPro, AMD K7 - Uwe Sieler 08/2008
AMD K8 CPU found
Using CF00-E2FF
Using E700-E7FF
Program installed
LowDMA (haftman# software 11/01): installed
Kernel: allocated 34 Diskbuffers = 18088 Bytes in HMA
Invalid Opcode at 5281 FFFF 0286 E0A0 0000 0000 0000 0000 E0A0 0000 017C 0000 0D86
==========================================================

 Then it halts.


2 Boot UMBPCI (optimal)
______________________

  It prints:

==========================================================
FreeDOS HIMEM64 3.26 [Aug 25 2006] (c) 1995, Till Gerken 2001-2005 tom ehlert
HIMEM - Fast A20 method used
UMBPCI c't 11/95 - Siering/Schäpers/Stiller
V3.77 - support for new chipsets, Inter PPro, AMD K7 - Uwe Sieler 08/2008
AMD K8 CPU found
Using CF00-E2FF
Using E700-E7FF
Program installed
LowDMA (haftman# software 11/01): installed
Kernel: allocated 34 Diskbuffers = 18088 Bytes in HMA
Invalid Opcode at 5281 FFFF 0286 E0A0 0000 0000 0000 0000 E0A0 0000 017C 0000 0D86
==========================================================

 
Then it halts.


3 Boot UMBPCI (semi-defensive)
_____________________________

  Works fine.


4 Boot EMM386 (optimal)
_______________________

  Works fine.


5 Boot EMM386 (semi-defensive)
______________________________

  Hangs at loading CD-ROM driver (no Invalid Opcode)
  If you skip the loading of the CD-ROM driver, it works fine.


6 Boot no UMB (defensive)
________________________

  It prints:

==========================================================
FreeDOS HIMEM64 3.26 [Aug 25 2006] (c) 1995, Till Gerken 2001-2005 tom ehlert
HIMEM - Fast A20 method used
Kernel: allocated 34 Diskbuffers = 18088 Bytes in HMA
Invalid Opcode at 4B51 FFFF 0206 0336 E898 9C8C D285 0475 C085 0374 C031 B8C3 00FF
==========================================================


7 Boot no UMB (ultra-defensive)
_____________________________

  Works fine.


The strange thing is, if I use grub4dos floppy emulation instead of sylinux/isolinux + memdisk
all entries work.

Syslinux/isolinux + memdisk + freedos image work in a virtual machine. Only on my real PC and
some other PCs, it doesn't work, while it does work perfect on some PCs also.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1635
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic..php?t=1829&highlight=invalid+opcode
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1545&highlight=invalid+opcode


Freedos image for UBCD download link:
http://ubcd.partedmagic.com/downloads/fdubcd/r133/fdubcd.igz

Freedos image for UBCD 'homepage':
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1422

You can also download the whole UBCD50b12.iso, if you want:
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1814


Gert Hulselmans