[syslinux] Booting firmware harddisk image with memdisk fails

Dag Wieers dag at wieers.com
Sun May 24 09:58:20 PDT 2009


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

> 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.

I am not sure how that makes a difference as doing it with a real device. 
Wit Qemu it works, I really do not see a point unless you want to find a 
case where it does not work with Qemu ?

The problem is the BIOS settings or my specific Thinkpad hardware and I 
fail to see how tests with Qemu will resolve any of that since all my 
tests in Qemu worked fine.


> 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.

My Qemu is newer and have seperate -kernel and -initrd options that work 
fine.


> 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.

Right, but the HDD image has almost no tools and I am not interested to 
ruin yet another blank CD for this. (I needed one to flash my SDD too 
because memdisk failed)


> 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.

Right, I would like to do another test with PXE, because in previous tests 
where it failed to boot using memdisk (those from 2004 and 2005) it always 
worked on the same hardware using pxelinux and even isolinux if I remember 
correctly (the archives hold this information).

memdisk would always fail from local disk or USB sticks. When using Linux 
or BSD images instead of DOS the kernel provided more information related 
to the disk. So I think it is being triggered by something BIOS/disk 
related.

But instead of doing all my tests again and copying the information from 
the screen like I did years ago I would like to know what I can do to help 
debug this without doing more tests and spending more time...

Nobody ever helped me in the past with this issue (and lots of people have 
reported it). Just look for the archives for memdisk and you will find 
dozens unresolved messages with the same symptoms.

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




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