[syslinux] drive size limit for syslinux [solved]

[Rance Hall]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 10:16 AM, Rance Hall <ranceh at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was working on making a 40gb laptop ide drive bootable via syslinux
> as the drive is in an external hd enclosure.
>
> syslinux installed on a 100 mb bootable fat32 partition and when I
> tried to boot from the drive, I got a syslinux prompt which was
> correct as I had not done a config file yet.
>
> I later found a 60GB laptop ide drive and put the larger drive in the
> enclosure and tried to install syslinux on that, using the same 100mb
> fat32 boot partition.
>
> This time no joy.
>
> I get an error indicating that no OS can be found.
>
> I triple checked and followed the exact same procedure in both cases,
> so I'm lost as to what is wrong.
>
> I can go back to the 40gb drive for sure, but this kind of stuff
> always interests me.
>
> Is there a non-bug reason why this wouldn't work, like a drive size
> limit in syslinux?
>
> P.S.: it was syslinux-4.03
>
> Thanks,
>
> Rance
>

I found the problem finally, but it wasnt with my procedure.  I was
tinkering with a way to boot a virtual machine device with the usb
drive as its root filesystem.  the VM simulated BIOS was getting in
the way all over the place.

I stuck the drive in a barebones linux install machine and fdisk'ed it
and installed syslinux.  It booted just fine on the bare metal.

Something inside the virtualizer prevented either the reading or the
writing of the usb disk.

Thanks all for helping me focus my search.