[syslinux] BIOS bug? USB + "Missing operating system"

[TJ]

On Fri, 2009-03-27 at 18:30 -0400, Miller, Shao wrote:
> Good day TJ,
> 
> A very nice description of your problem and processes.  Thanks.
> 
> Have you tried the USB stick in other computers with different BIOSes?
> Some BIOSes want to establish the USB stick as BIOS drive 0x00 in a
> "superfloppy" mode of operation, in which case you might be getting
> unexpected results.  That's just a thought.

I've only got access to one other that will USB-boot that I know of
(Acer Travelmate C100) and it also fails - I _think_ that's an Award
BIOS.

The Vaio will boot from another USB flash device (2GB Sandisk) so I know
the BIOS boot process works - with hard disk present :)
 
I'm wondering if the larger geometry somehow causes the issue. Hence
it'd be nice to actually capture what the BIOS is telling the MBR.

I've seen mention that devices formatted with FAT16 will boot okay when
they fail to boot using FAT32/FAT32 LBA. I could understand that for a
non-partitioned device (is that what you term a super-floppy?) but these
device all have MSDOS disk labels with two or more partitions. Cylinder
geometry for the boot partitions is always under 1024.

I've not tested the FAT16 aspect as yet because I didn't want to upset a
nicely formatted USB device that works perfectly when attached to a
KVM/QEMU virtual machine.

Looks like I've got some quick catching-up to do in the assembler/BIOS
int calls department :)