[syslinux] Syslinux drive confusion

[Berth-Olof Bergman]

I have the following problem with syslinux. With boards with same core chipset and bios, syslinux fails on some boards. The difference on boards are that the ones that succeed has standard PC components (KBC, PATA). The ones that failes have SATA only and no KBC.

It does not matter if I boot from USB or Compact flash drive. I has been noted that the bootloader calls BIOS functions for a drive which are not the boot drive. The boot drive is always 0x80, but the syslinux bootloader do calls for a drive in the range 0x7f or something like that.

Anyway everything goes well up to it's time to load the menu. I now get almost a screen full of a text mode graphics character. 

When running Ami BIOS it works, so this is clearly a BIOS dependency. The question is what. Our own 32-bit OS runs without problem. The BIOS follows the standards and the hardware are initialized properly.

I know Linux has made a mess of SATA (sd) and PATA (hd). The failing BIOS run SATA in legacy mode. Can this be a factor here?

B-O Bergman
Zebor Technology