[syslinux] Debian bug#604245: Syslinux fails (does not receive key presses on Sony vaio Z12C5E)

[Ferenc Wagner]

Gyorgy Jeney <nog.lkml at gmail.com> writes:

> On 22 November 2010 22:46, Ferenc Wagner <wferi at niif.hu> wrote:
>
>> "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> writes:
>>
>>> For a regression... I really need it narrowed down... 3.71 to 4.02 is a
>>> huge change.
>>
>> That's of course true.  György, are you willing to test some
>> intermediate syslinux versions on this machine?
>
> I checked out the git version of syslinux and tried to do a bisection,
> but there where so many un-testable points (uncompilable, fails due to
> something else) between syslinux-3.86 (last known working) and
> syslinux-4.00 (first known non-working) that I gave up on the
> bisection.
>
> But then I noticed that I wasn't following the (debian) instructions
> properly and I was writing the image to /dev/sde, instead of
> /dev/sde1.  As soon as a partition was created, an appropriate MBR
> installed, the image in question worked on the Sony.
>
> Is such partition-less configurations supported?

Hi all,

First of all: I confused myself, isohybrid is totally out of the
picture, your didn't use an ISO but an HD image.  Now the really
confusing this is that the documentation of the HD image
http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/squeeze/main/installer-amd64/current/images/hd-media/boot.img.gz
*really* says it should be extracted straight into a full disk device,
but the image does not contain a partition table, so actually it's a
big, irregular floppy image.  The same is true for the lenny image, btw.
So I'd summarize the issue as: Syslinux 3.71 works when booted
partitionless (with the Syslinux boot sector in the place of the MBR)
from a USB drive on your machine, but 4.02 does not.

Now, as I understand, your manual testing followed the partitionless
scheme as well, and shows that even 3.86 works in this way, and 4.00
already fails.  Right?

On the other hand, if you created a partition on your USB drive and
extracted the squeeze HD image into the partition, it started to work,
right?

Syslinux certainly used to work partitionless.  Maybe this feature was
inadvertently lost during the major version change...  Peter?

On the other hand, I don't understand why Debian uses partitionless HD
images for the installer.
-- 
Thanks,
Feri.