[syslinux] PXE looping on localboot

[Vanush Misha Paturyan]

On Thu, 24 May 2012 13:09:55 +0000 "Waldron, Michael H"
<mwaldron at email.unc.edu> wrote:

> I have seen posts about this problem, but have had trouble finding
> how/if it was resolved. I am trying to upgrade from syslinux-3.11 to
> syslinux-3.86 on RHEL5.
> 
> On 3.86, when it performs a local boot from hard disk, it just keeps
> looping back into PXE boot again instead of booting from the hard
> disk. It will perform a system install just fine, but when it
> switches to localboot after the install, it keeps looping through PXE
> boot.

My workaround for this problem was not to upgrade to 3.86. On my
hardware (IBM System x3550 -[797841Y]) the problem appeared in
3.85_pre10. (It still exists in 4.10pre20). 

> I also noticed that in 3.86, there's a message on the console about
> "!PXE entry point not found" which I don't see in 3.11. The hardware
> involved is IBM BladeCenter HS21, with onboard Broadcom gigabit
> ethernet.

My network card is an on-board dual-head Broadcom BCM5715C Ethernet
Controller.

I see following messages during boot (this was logged with 4.10-pre20)

Broadcom UNDI PXE-2.1 v2.8.5
Copyright (C) 2000-2006 Broadcom Corporation
Copyright (C) 1997-2000 Intel Corporation
All rights reserved.

Then usual DHCP negotiation, retrieval of pxelinux.0, followed by:
PXELINUX 4.10 4.10-pre20  Copyright (C) 1994-2012 H. Peter Anvin et al
!PXE entry point found (we hope) at 957A:00D6 via plan A
UNDI code segment at 957A len 4964
UNDI-data)segment at 8FAA len 5D00
UNDI: baseio 0000 int 7 MTU 1500 type 1 "DIX+802.3" flags 0x1c1b
Getting cached packet  01 02 03
My IP address seems to be xxxxxxxx xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
UNDI: IRQ 7(0x0f): 89a4:506a -> 0000:8de2

"Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM", appears on the screen, followed by another
cycle of booting. At some point (after 3 or 4th loop) following appears:
"It appears your computer has only 271K of low ("DOS") RAM."

Let me know if there is any more information I can collect and provide?

Cheers,

Misha
-- 
Vanush "Misha" Paturyan
Senior Technical Officer
Room 1.37
Computer Science Department
NUI Maynooth