[syslinux] Booting firmware harddisk image with memdisk fails

Miller, Shao Shao.Miller at yrdsb.edu.on.ca
Sun May 24 09:20:56 PDT 2009


What about the following test?:

qemu -hda foo.hdd -boot c

where foo.hdd is a small blank image that underwent the following steps:
- Formatted as FAT from within QEmu itself (maybe a DOS floppy as -fda)
- SYSLINUX installed
- A small syslinux.cfg file which boots MEMDISK and the firmware HDD
image
- MEMDISK copied to the partition
- The firmware image copied to the partition

In this case, QEmu would have an HDD attached.  I'm curious as to
whether or not that would work.

My QEmu (0.9.0) demands an -hda parameter when using -kernel, but I
didn't see one in your QEmu command-line.  Is it possible that your QEmu
is newer and uses the -initrd param as an alias for -hda in the case of
-kernel?  I have no idea at the moment.

It would still be good to know the correct geometry of the HDD image.
If you can boot the image from the .ISO and get a DOS CLI (maybe by
hitting F8 really quickly as PC-DOS loads!) then you could perhaps run a
DOS util to find the geometry.  Such utils might be GRUB4DOS or
PartitionMagic or something else.

Also, if these are thin clients without HDDs, or if you want to have
some fun, you could SAN-boot the firmware image using gPXE's AoE or
iSCSI support!  Heh.

- 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 12:05
To: For discussion of Syslinux and tftp-hpa
Subject: Re: [syslinux] Booting firmware harddisk image with memdisk
fails

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/   --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]

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