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

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

Ady, before responding to you further, I'll ask you now to take onje
more (fresh) look at this thread that I started over in the GParted
forums:

   http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/viewtopic.php?pid=31834

Please note that I have now followed-up on myself and that I have added
quite a lot of new & additional information.

It now appears to me that GParted's reporting of the status of the
per-partition "bootable" flags may have been right all along, *but*
if that is true, then the BIOS of my GA-M55Plus-S3G motherboard has
some *really* serious drain bamage, because if there is a mass storage
device connected to this motherboard via USB and if that device has
an MBR partition table and only one partition, and if the "bootable"
flags for that one partition, as reported by GParted, is *set*, then the
BIOS on this motherboard will, paradoxically, *not* see the drive in
question as bootable, and conversely, if the partiton's bootable flag
is *not* set, then in that case the BIOS *does* see the device as bootable.

This is clearly bass ackwards, but I have verified this several times
now, and I believe that the BIOS is just plain wrong, i.e. it is probably
the one that has things bass-ackwards.  (But this theory still fails to
explain how my main/regular hard drive for this same desktop system
came to have the bootable flag on the actual Win7 OS partition UN-set.
I can assure you that *I* never did anything to set it like that.  I did
however perform a totally plain vanilla install of Win7 ("retail"
version) onto this exact drive from an official MS Win7 CD not very
long ago.

Separately, having failed, utterly, to get anywhere when I tried to use
GParted to both (1) install an MBR record and to (2) create the one
FAT32 partition that we need, I decided to back up and try again to use
your recommended tool, RUFUS, instead, and see how far I could get with
that.

The results were enlightening.  I asked RUFUS to create for me a USB
stick which was bootable and which contained FreeDOS.  It obliged me.
I subsequently took the resulting USB stick and tried to boot it on
both my laptop and my small HTPC system.  In both cases it booted to
FreeDOS with no problem at all.  I then looked in detail at what RUFUS
had created for me, using GParted.  Of course, RUFUS had created a MBR
partition table, and that table, of course, contained only one entry.
It is the *flags* on that one RUFUS-created partition that I found
especially interesting.  According to GParted, the partition that RUFUS
created had two (and only two) partition flags set, i.e. the bootable
flag and the "LBA" flag.

Obviously, this is why my ill-advised efforts to create a bootable
USB stick, starting with GParted, failed.  I had no idea at that
time that I needed to set _both_ the bootable flag and the (non-
standard?) "LBA" flag.  But apparently both are vital.  Now I know.
(Actually, someone else in this thread mentioned "LBA" but I failed
to properly read those comments.  Sorry.)

In any case, I'm sure that you would like to know what happend when I
took my perfectly working perfectly bootable RUFUS-generated FreeDOS
USB stick and tried to boot it on my problematic GA-M55Plus-S3G system.
But you could easily predict what happened when I did this, based on
everything else I've already said.  Remember that RUFUS *does* set the
bootable flag and that, as I said already, my goofy motherboard refuses
to see a USB-connected device as being bootable if the device in question
contains a single partition that *does* have that flag set.

In short, that perfectly working RUFUS-generated bootable FreeDOS USB
stick that worked just fine on both my laptop and HTPC failed to boot
on my (desktop) GA-M55Plus-S3G system, because it had the bootable flag
set, and in all such cases, this motherboard doesn't even list such
things in its Boot Priority list.  It is like the device is not even
there at all!

(I am still in the process of exchanging e-mails with a tech support
guy @ Gigabyte, and you can bet your bottom dollar that I will be giving
him very much of a hard time about this.)

Anyway, that is the bottom line.  It appears to me that RUFUS isn't
even using SYSLINUX.  Is that correct?  Regardless of what it uses,
even it can't/won't generate a USB stick that this motherboard is
willing to boot, so that fact says to me that this really isn't even a
SYSLINUX problem... and I probably shouldn't have bothered any of you
folks with any of this.  My apologies.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  Just for laughs, I did try taking that perfectly working RUFUS-
generated FreeDOS USB stick and (using GParted) UN-setting its bootable
flag, just so that I could try, one last time, to see if maybe that
was all that might be needed to entice the GA-M55Plus-S3G to boot from
it.  Then I tried again to boot the GA-M55Plus-S3G from the USB stick.
This also failed.  (The system freezes just after printing "Boot from
CD/DVD :") I believe that the reason most probably has something to do
with that LBA flag.  The BIOS on this brain damaged motherboard probably
doesn't properly understand that either.  (And actually, it appears,
based on my googling, that this LBA flag may not be "standardized" in
any meaningful sense anyway.  So maybe the motherboard isn't in any
sense obligated to do what RUFUS and/or GParted and/or anybody else
thinks ought to be done with that flag.)

Anyway, sorry, but I don't think that I want to work on this problem
any more.  It isn't fun and it just isn't worth my time.  It is more
cost effective for me to just replace the motherboard with something
sane... something that works, both with SYSLINUX and also with RUFUS-
created sticks.

If/when I do replace it, I'll be more than happy to ship it to you Ady,
or anybody else who desires to conduct further tests.