[syslinux] USB boot problems on Gigabyte GA-M55Plus-S3G

[Mattias Schlenker]

Am 10.01.2014 13:10, schrieb Thomas Schmitt:
> Is the reason for these failures known ?
> Can it be high boot image addresses and the partly uninitialized
> 32 bit processor register ?


I've seen similar boot failures. Some older BIOSes seem to fail booting 
from higher LBAs (might be the partially uninitialized register). In 
this case when booting with Syslinux from FAT you have to first 
install/populate the boot directory and afterwards install the big 
squashfs containers. In some cases however Syslinux seems to corrupt the 
FAT filesystem so that writing large files on the FS will result in 
corrupted files. I will investigate later on this to find out if the 
issue still exists in 6.03.

Thus one should try booting the "difficult" main board first with 
Isohybrid ISOs that use a low LBA and proper path names. The official 
Ubuntu image does so or recent LessLinux images 
http://blog.lesslinux.org/ Use either Win32DiskImager or the linux 
command dd to overwrite the thumb drive:

dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdx

BTW: There are lots of cheap USB thumb drives out there that flip bits 
after a few hundred writes! So in LessLinux I implemented an integrity 
check upon first boot from thumb drives. You can manually check the 
written thumb drive after disconnecting and reconnecting:

md5sum /path/to/image.iso
dd if=/dev/sdx bs=2048 count=` ls -la /path/to/image.iso | awk '{print 
$5 / 2048 }' ` | md5sum

Regards,
Mattias

-- 
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