[syslinux] "isolinux.bin missing or corrupt" when booting USB flash drive in old PC

Martin Str|mberg ams at ludd.ltu.se
Sat Mar 18 22:08:27 PDT 2017


Ady Ady wrote:
> either I would simply use optical media, or I would be partitioning and
> formatting the USB device (these are _not_ complete detailed
> instructions):
> 
> _ MBR (aka "msdos" partition) scheme
> _ create one partition
> _ set the partition as "bootable" (aka "active" flag)
> _ dd mbr.bin
> _ mount the partition; format it as FAT32
> _ copy the _content_ of the ISO image to the FAT32 partition
> _ install SYSLINUX on the FAT32 partition (and replace .c32 modules
> with a matching version, if needed)

Yes, I recommend this. I've been doing this with Debian live images
successfully many times. It was some time ago I created theese, so I
was using Debian 6 and 7 and thus syslinux 4.<something>.

But still I found a new machine that wouldn't boot one stick and would
another. IIRC, that BIOS didn't like the old CHS partitioning. The
non-booting stick had a start sector of 83 (or something), while the
booting one had 2048.


-- 
MartinS


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