[syslinux] Sysinux 6 will not boot ISOs on BIOS (i.e. pre-UEFI) systems

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

well, my oldish non-UEFI system boots by 6.02 from CD-RW:
  CPU:  AMD Athlon II X4 620 Quad-Core
  Mainboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2H AM2 GLAN RAID.
  Award BIOS v6.00 PC
There must be some other ingredients needed for failure.


> https://www.archlinux.org/download/

This leads me to e.g.
  http://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/linux/archlinux/iso/2013.11.01/archlinux-2013.11.01-dual.iso

Put on CD-RW the image boots for me to a menu, where i select
"x86_64". Then a kernel comes up with normal messages and
finally i get a shell prompt for root.

"ISOLINUX 6.02 ETCD" shows up swiftly before i get the menu.


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Details about the image:

It bears El Torito with BIOS boot image
  /isolinux/isolinux.bin
and EFI boot image
  /EFI/archiso/efiboot.img

MBR marks the whole image as partition 1 and the EFI boot image
as partition 2 (i.e. inside partition 1).
There is also a GPT.

I brought it onto CD-RW by:
  $ xorriso -as cdrecord \
        -v dev=/dev/sr2 blank=as_needed \
        archlinux-2013.11.01-dual.iso

The CD-RW is mountable and all file content is readable without
i/o errors. MD5 matches 2013.11.01/md5sums.txt 
  $ dd if=/dev/sr2 bs=2048 count=264192 | md5sum
  2535d1308fcc4f12420433dba039b3b6

  $ strings /mnt/isolinux/isolinux.bin | grep ISOLINUX
  ISOLINUX 6.02  

-------------------------------------------------------------

Have a nice day :)

Thomas