[syslinux] Possible memdisk issue

[Gene Cumm]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 7:45 PM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
> On 07/08/2014 04:42 PM, Alexander Perlis wrote:
>> On 07/08/2014 05:55 PM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>> On 07/08/2014 03:05 PM, Alexander Perlis wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Question: what's special about the transition from 8203KiB to 8204KiB?
>>>> Both have CHS=8/64/32 and both involve a fractional end cylinder.
>>>
>>> Fractional cylinders with floppy disks is almost certainly a very bad
>>> thing.
>>>
>>
>> Agreed, but that doesn't appear to be the issue here. Fractional 8203K
>> FreeDOS does work, yet larger values, including non-fractional ones, do
>> not.
>>
>
> Yes, that is odd.  You might be looking at the transition point from
> FAT12 to FAT16 maybe...

Although I've never seen the restart loop, the size-dependence sounds
like a hardware-specific memory component like memory map leading to
different placement or actual memory usage not lining up with the map.

Have you tried these images on other hardware?  Have you tried MEMDISK
from 3.86 or 4.04?  Have you tried a Syslinux variant of 3.86 or 4.04
with MEMDISK 3.86, 4.04 or 6.03-pre18?

-- 
-Gene