[syslinux] Booting firmware harddisk image with memdisk fails

[Miller, Shao]

Good day Dag and Michael,

In regards to you challenge MEMDISK-booting an HDD image extracted from
an .ISO image, I'm curious:
- I know all MEMDISK options were tried at one point; did that include
"raw"?
- Are you specifying c= h= s= geometry for the HDD image?  If so, how
are you determining the correct c= h= s= to pass?
- If you use the HDD with QEmu as an _actual_ HDD, does that work?

qemu -hda foo.hdd -boot c

- If you give QEmu some other HDD image, then try booting QEmu and doing
the MEMDISK thing with the extracted image, does that work?  I know you
said it works in QEmu, so I am asking if it is because QEmu has no other
HDDs in your test, or if changing that parameter changes the test's
success

Good luck!

- Shao Miller

-----Original Message-----
From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com] On
Behalf Of Dag Wieers
Sent: Sunday, May 24, 2009 08:56
To: For discussion of Syslinux and tftp-hpa
Subject: Re: [syslinux] Booting firmware harddisk image with memdisk
fails

On Sat, 23 May 2009, Michael Grundmann wrote:

> Dag Wieers schrieb:
>>  On Sat, 23 May 2009, Michael Grundmann wrote:
>> 
>> >  i did it sucessfully on my t400 with syslinux 3.80 (built form
source on 
>> >  a
>> >  gentoo machine)
>>
>>  I don't think the version makes a difference. But is it possible
that the
>>  (older) versions of the build tools exposes a bug on certain
hardware ?
>>
>>  If so, it could be useful to send me your compiled memdisk so I can
simply
>>  try to see if it makes a difference on my system.
>
> its compiled for x86_64 if that doesnt matter?

Michael send me his memdisk, and I had exactly the same problem. Memdisk

boots and I get:

----
Lenovo Group Limited

Starting PC DOS...


----

and then nothing. While in Qemu it goes into the firmware 
flash application.

Michael has a Thinkpad T400 which worked. The author of the ThinkWiki
page 
has a Thinkpad X200 and it worked too. I have a Thinkpad X200s with the 
same BIOS release and it fails.

It fails on my hardware with Michael's memdisk (and with the ones I 
tested) so we can rule out the memdisk build and we can rule out the
BIOS 
version.

I can only conclude that it has to do with a BIOS option or hardware 
configuration that triggers a bug in memdisk. I went over a lot of BIOS 
options, and changed some options that should not have any impact, to no

avail.

Peter, do you have anything worthwhile to add that I can test ?

The harddisk image I am testing comes from the type 4 eltorito ISO at:

 	http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-70348.html

and can be extracted either with the isobar utility or with a patched 
geteltorito script. (both come packaged with RPMforge)

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]

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