[syslinux] Booting firmware harddisk image with memdisk fails

[Dag Wieers]

On Sun, 24 May 2009, Miller, Shao wrote:

> 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"?

Yes.

> - Are you specifying c= h= s= geometry for the HDD image?  If so, how
> are you determining the correct c= h= s= to pass?

No, I was planning to look if for Qemu the C/H/S was the same as for my 
BIOS. I would think it is the same though. Since it is the same image and 
the same memdisk. And it works within Qemu and it works for others :)

> - If you use the HDD with QEmu as an _actual_ HDD, does that work?
>
> qemu -hda foo.hdd -boot c

It does not contain a bootloader. What works is:

 	qemu -kernel /boot/memdisk -initrd /boot/6duj08uc.img

> - 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

I tried with a USB stick as well as my built-in SD reader and an 16GB SDHC 
card and it fails there too. Both do work within Qemu.

And the same image works with memdisk on someone else's X200 and T400, 
while it fails on my X200s. So there is something fishy going on.

BTW I reported it also on ThinkWiki and there are others having the same 
problem, so it is not just me either :)

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Talk:BIOS_update_without_optical_disk

-- 
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
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