[syslinux] Booting firmware harddisk image with memdisk fails

[Dag Wieers]

On Mon, 25 May 2009, Dag Wieers wrote:

> On Sun, 24 May 2009, colimit at gmail.com wrote:
>
>> >  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)
>>
>>  hi, I am the guy who made that isobar/geteltorito patch. Since you have
>>  an ultrabase, I assume that you've also decided not to go cheap with a
>>  regular harddrive and bought an SSD for your X200s. Did you try to put a
>>  regular SATA harddrive, and setting AHCI mode on/off in BIOS (I have it
>>  "On")? May be memdisk's hijacked INT13h has problems with accessing SSD?
>
> I have an SSD and have AHCI on. I will try this evening to see if that is the 
> problem.
>
> But if accessing the disk after memdisk is a problem, maybe it could be 
> useful to disable physical disks altogether with an option in memdisk. I 
> don't know how hard it is to do that, but it definitely would be useful.

As Peter suggests, it is not related. I tried today on a friend's T60 with 
exactly the same problem. This system has no AHCI or SSD.

However I do think it is related to disk access since in the early tests 
2004/2005 freebsd and linux images clearly indicated problems scanning or 
accessing the disk when using memdisk.

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