[syslinux] Dell machine boots a Windows formatted FAT16 USB drive not a Ubuntu formatted FAT16 drive.

[Mark Barton]

Hi All,
First post and hopefully someone can steer me in 
the right direction for this problem. I did a bit 
of googling and found some hints but nothing concrete.

We are using Syslinux and a FAT32 USB thumb drive 
(single partition) to boot a customized Debian OS 
which works very well with newer motherboards. 
However we have a few older Dell machines that 
simply hangs when trying to boot using the same 
drive. Someone suggested that we try FAT16 
filesystem which I created using Ubuntu disk 
utility and as well as mkdosfs command line 
utility. I reduced the partition size to 1 GB for 
FAT16. Neither worked. However a colleague created 
a FAT16 drive on a Windows machine and that booted 
just fine on the Dell.

So my question is there some specific drive 
parameters I should be selecting when creating a 
FAT16 USB thumb drive that is acceptable to the 
old Dell machines?

Any help is always appreciated.

Mark