[syslinux] Bug-report: Memdisk regression for XMGR DOS memory manager

Fri Apr 9 22:41:28 PDT 2010

For the boot floppy at http://superkeen.com/peacecorpsfiles/FUZOMA14.IMG
using memdisk from syslinux version 3.72 boots correctly, but for
memdisk versions newer than 3.72 (I tested 3.73, 3.75, 3.85, and 3.86)
all hang at boot with the following message:

Loading boot sector... booting
FreeDOS kernel - SVN (build 2039 OEM:0xfd [compiled Oct 2 2009])
Kernel compatibility 6.22 - BORLANDC
...
XMGR, 11-22-2009 48 XMS handles
Kernel: allocated 48 diskbuffers = 25536 Bytes in HMA

The syslinux.cfg file I am using is as follows:

default linux
label linux
kernel /memdisk
append initrd=/FUZOMA14.IMG

The boot medium I am using is a superfloppy-formatted FAT32 USB drive.

The OS I am running is Ubuntu 9.10 on amd64, though since I'm using the
upstream compiled binary version of syslinux and memdisk I don't think
this should matter.

( forwarded from report at
http://bugs.launchpad.net/unetbootin/+bug/556416 )