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

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <73645861681468542 at scdbackup.webframe.org>, 
"Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup at gmx.net> wrote:

>me:
>> > Check whether it fails with Clonezilla.
>Ronald F. Guilmette:
>> Please be specific.  For Clonezilla, there are many different versions
>
>Any failure on the same stick which also succeeds is enough
>to kill the theory of bad relation between USB stick and
>mainboard.
>You have proven this by the success and failure with the 2 GB
>stick.

OK.  I believe that I understand what you just said.  (Actually, I for
one never even contemplated the possibility of any sort of bad inter-
action between a specific USB stick and a specific motherboard.  Do
such instances ever actually crop up, in practice?  I would guess
not.)

>So the problem must be either in partitioning or in the filesystem
>format. That's out of my personal expertise, though.

Mine too.

>> I await your direction.
>
>I lack the skills for explicit directions how to explore
>the plausible suspicions of Ady and Peter:

Very well.  I await detailed instructions from one or both of them.

>CHS means Cylinder/Head/Sector addressing method.

I knew that, actually.

>The Master Boot Record (MBR) at the beginning of the stick has
>a partition table with block addresses in two alternative forms.

Hummm... so the world has not entirely done away with the kludgy,
antiquated and anachronistic old C/H/S addressing scheme just yet,
eh?

Too bad.  We should be rid of it once and for all.  (As I understand
it, it has been AT LEAST more than a decade and a half... or maybe
two... since the notion of physical/addressable cylinders had any
relevance to any actual products on the market.)

>There are FAT filesystems which operate via CHS addresses,

Still??  Who uses them?  Why do they continue to use them?

(I guess that there will always be some hold-out who is still running
MS-DOS 5.0 or Windows 3.1.  But I don't think that any of the rest of
us should provide any support or encouragement to them.)

>So Peter proposes to try 32 sectors per head and 64 heads per...

If Peter desires me to run another test, he will need to give me
detailed instructions on what exactly he wants done. I will then
attempt to follow those instructions to the best of my ability, but
my hope is that I will only need to fetch files, dd them to sticks,
and then try booting them.


Regards,
rfg