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

Ady Ady ady-sf at hotmail.com
Wed Mar 22 02:55:12 PDT 2017


> Hi,
> 
> MartinS wrote:
> > I want to say I've managed to simulate David's error in
> > qemu by forcing isohdpfx.bin to fail the EBIOS test.
> 
> Wow. This could mean that the C/H/S related code is generally unsuitable
> for the job.
> 
 
As I mentioned in the other email thread (I don't know whether readers 
are following both threads or just this one), this is why I suggested 
to use the diag/*.img before. That's the reason they were created, no 
need to combine anything, no need to build anything.

And these 2 email threads are a case in point: use SYSLINUX as soon as 
isohybrid fails.

I have suggested (in the other email thread) 3 _simple_ tests. I hope 
we get the feedback.

Regarding having some debug/diagnose variant of the isohybrid MBR, IMHO 
we should simply start a new "clean" thread and use qemu for testing it 
(now that Martin was able to replicate the issue). If David is kind 
enough to test that one too, excellent. And if all this ends up in a 
new alternative "diag" MBR that can be included in the official code, 
even better.

@Thomas, please remember that the isohybrid tool is supposed to have 
(C)HS parameters but that most distro maintainers don't care to use 
them. For an ISO image smaller than 1GiB, the recommended (C)HS values 
(in order to obtain max compatibility) are not the same that are 
recommended for a bigger image. And here we have a "small" ISO image 
with a "medium" sized USB device, so we should not be surprised to see 
some BIOS implementations being confused and thus failing to boot.


> 
> > C<LBA0>/<C0>/<H0>/<S0>
> > <LBA1>/<C1>/<H1>/<S1>
> > <LBA2>/<C2>/<H2>/<S2>
> > <LBA3>/<C3>/<H3>/<S3>
> 
> Anything strange to see with this sequence of addresses which are
> supposed to be consequtive ?
> 
> Whatever, if this was only about confused addresses, then David would
> probably see one of the blocks with numbered content.
> The all-0 read result looks rather like there had been no reading
> at all.
> 
> It will be interesting to hear from David whether a non-zero block
> is read when he fills the USB stick up to the end.
> 
> 
> Have a nice day :)
> 
> Thomas
> 
 
 
Regards,
Ady.


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