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

[Jeff Sadowski]

Plug in the USB drive then go to the bios see if you have the USB
stick listed as a regular hard drive to boot from. The Missing
Operating system message was what I was getting when I wrote in about
one of my computers. If you can choose it as a regular hard drive see
if that works. Some BIOS's like to claim USB drives as regular hard
drives. Which make it a bitch to choose as a removable media like I'd
want to.


On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 2:22 AM, TJ <ubuntu at tjworld.net> wrote:
> 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 :)
>
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