SYSLINUX 2.10 2004-06-18 That is all I get when I boot my system off a CompactFlash card in an IDE adapter, no matter how long I wait. What debugging steps are recommended? I'm willing to get down and dirty with assembler, and I'd appreciate suggestions of what to suspect and where to start. Details: This is a Crucial 128MB CompactFlash card in a non-hot-swap CF-IDE adapter which reports itself as a hard drive with 978/8/32 C/H/S. The card is partitioned, and the first (and only) file system is FAT16. The adapter is the primary (and only) device on the first IDE port. The MBR, boot sector and LDLINUX.SYS are from SYSLINUX 2.10. -- John K. Hohm ProviNET Solutions <jhohm at provinet.com>
H. Peter Anvin
2004-Aug-04 01:09 UTC
[syslinux] CF boot stops after version and date output
John Hohm wrote:> SYSLINUX 2.10 2004-06-18 > > That is all I get when I boot my system off a CompactFlash card in an > IDE adapter, no matter how long I wait. What debugging steps are > recommended? I'm willing to get down and dirty with assembler, and I'd > appreciate suggestions of what to suspect and where to start. > > Details: > > This is a Crucial 128MB CompactFlash card in a non-hot-swap CF-IDE > adapter which reports itself as a hard drive with 978/8/32 C/H/S. The > card is partitioned, and the first (and only) file system is FAT16. The > adapter is the primary (and only) device on the first IDE port. The > MBR, boot sector and LDLINUX.SYS are from SYSLINUX 2.10. >Please try 2.09. If that works, please try 2.10-pre4 and 2.10-pre5. There seems to be some platforms for which that broke, and I'd really like to get a fix into the next 2.11-pre, but quite frankly I haven't figured out what broke yet. -hpa
H. Peter Anvin wrote:> John Hohm wrote: > > SYSLINUX 2.10 2004-06-18 > > > > That is all I get when I boot my system off a CompactFlash card inan> > IDE adapter, no matter how long I wait. What debugging steps are > > recommended? I'm willing to get down and dirty with assembler, andI'd> > appreciate suggestions of what to suspect and where to start.> Please try 2.09. If that works, please try 2.10-pre4 and 2.10-pre5.I tried 2.09 and 1.76, and apart from getting a different version number and date, they behave exactly the same as 2.10. -- John K. Hohm ProviNET Solutions <jhohm at provinet.com>
H. Peter Anvin wrote:> OK, then you probably have a buggy BIOS which returns a different > geometry than it's actually simulating. Try upgrading your BIOSfrist;> then try using "USB-ZIP" or "USB-FDD" as the simulation mode (assuming > you have "USB-HDD" now) and using an unpartitioned device.Unfortunately there is no newer BIOS for the board (an Intel SE7501WV2). The BIOS appears not to be using a simulation mode; the adapter I am using claims to be an IDE hard drive (it should put the CompactFlash into TrueIDE mode) and the BIOS seems to recognize it as such. I made a hacked MBR that dumps out the int13h ah=08h results, and it reported the normal parameters for a 128MB CompactFlash: 978/8/32 C/H/S. The partition table and the FAT16 partition also have that geometry.> Other than that I probably can't help you.Just for debugging I'm going to try some completely different boot loaders, but I eventually want SYSLINUX because I'm going to use LEAF. Do you know of any other software that can assist in debugging a boot problem like this? Something like isolinux-debug but for hard drives? Regardless, thanks very much for your help so far, and for writing SYSLINUX. -- John K. Hohm ProviNET Solutions <jhohm at provinet.com>