[syslinux] Question of syslinux chainloading

Ady Ady ady-sf at hotmail.com
Thu Apr 4 20:28:46 PDT 2019


> Greetings,
> I encounter a problem that should be basic, but I can't get a clue. I
> have 8G USB disk formatted as FAT32. I run (syslinux -i -s -r -m H:)
> to make it bootable, and write syslinux.cfg according to the
> documents, but it will not boot some items.
> 
> Syslinux is 6.03, bios files used. The whole syslinux.cfg file:
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> path /syslinux
> UI menu.c32
> prompt 1
> timeout 250
> 
> menu title Multi-purpose Boot Disk
> 
> #This item fails
> label normal
> menu default
> menu label Boot from ^hard disk
> com32 chain.c32 hd1
 
 
>From the Syslinux boot menu, press [Esc] in order to get to the boot prompt. At 
the boot prompt, type in:

normal

and press [Enter].

Is there any (error) message then? Where/how exactly this fails? What exactly 
happens after the message(s)?

Test #2: if you unplug the USB and reboot the system, can you successfully boot 
directly to the HDD's OS?

Test #3: Add an entry to your syslinux.cfg:

label hd1_1
com32 chain.c32
# Boot to first partition of ...
# There is a space character before the partition number.
append hd1 1


> 
> label loadhd
> menu label Boot from local ^NTLDR
> com32 chain.c32 ntldr=/ntldr
> 
> #This item fails
> label dos
> menu label MS-^DOS 7.1
> com32 chain.c32 msdos7=io.sys
 
 
Where exactly the files needed to boot MSDOS 7.1 are located?

Do you have the module file "ls.c32" in the USB? If you have it, you could:

1_ From the Syslinux boot menu, press [Esc] in order to get to the boot prompt.

2_ At the boot prompt, type in "ls.c32" and press [Enter].

The result should list the files that are included in the current working 
directory. Are the files needed to boot MSDOS 7.1 listed?

Regards,
Ady.



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