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

Gene Cumm gene.cumm at gmail.com
Sat Jan 4 09:34:57 PST 2014


On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 6:59 AM, Mark Barton <mbarton451 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

What particular model(s) and BIOS revs?  Most of the time, newer revs help.

My experience has been there's no hard and fast rule for geometry
except don't force any geometry and stick with standard partition
bounds (end at cylinder boundary; start at cylinder or cylinder + 1
head).

If starting with a blank drive on Linux, force fdisk into
compatibility mode and let it auto-select the sectors per head and
heads per cylinder then let it follow the standard cylinder alignment.
 I'd also recommend a USB drive of 4GiB or less when seeking
compatibility.

-- 
-Gene


More information about the Syslinux mailing list