Syslinux - May 2006 - Problems booting on Intel i9x5 motherboards.

Hello,

I'm using Isolinux 3.11 to make a boot image with a variety of 2.6 kernels.

I have two Intel-branded motherboards with i915 and i945 chipsets that 
have trouble booting with menu.c32.

If I load the image from the isolinux commandline with a set of append 
parameters, it works. The same settings loaded from the menu.c32 causes 
the kernel to load and promptly hang.

All I can tell is that it gets as far as setting the framebuffer video mode.

Has anyone else experienced this behaviour? Is there anything I can do 
to help debug this?

I have tried the latest com32 code from git and it did not help, btw.

Thanks!
--Pat

Very strange.  Well, I'll tell you the first thing you should do.
3.11 is pretty old.  I guess it's the current "official" release,
but,
in my experience the latest betas have made quite a few improvements
not just in functionality, but, they seem to be more reliable at
booting (particularly on finicky hardware like my old system using
1999 hardware that had troubles booting thanks to a broken ebios which
lied to syslinux and said it wasn't broken up until the moment
syslinux actually used it and it bombed out.)

In particular, I'm thinking that since menu.c32 seems to be the
culprit here, it might be useful to ensure that whatever the issue is,
it wasn't fixed later.  There haven't been very many changes to
menu.c32 that I know of, but, I think it has been through at least one
minor change since 3.11 (I think there was a new option added or
something wasn't there?)  If that fails to work, try the other
direction.  Use some older versions and see what happens.  In
particular, if you have to go to an older version to get one that
works on that hardware, it makes tracking down the problem a lot
easier if you can find which specific version (even try the betas.)

Good luck.  Maybe you'll get lucky and the latest beta works 100% so
that you don't even have to really solve the actual problem.  ^_^


On 5/23/06, Pat Suwalski <pat at suwalski.net>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm using Isolinux 3.11 to make a boot image with a variety of 2.6
kernels.
>
> I have two Intel-branded motherboards with i915 and i945 chipsets that
> have trouble booting with menu.c32.
>
> If I load the image from the isolinux commandline with a set of append
> parameters, it works. The same settings loaded from the menu.c32 causes
> the kernel to load and promptly hang.
>
> All I can tell is that it gets as far as setting the framebuffer video
mode.
>
> Has anyone else experienced this behaviour? Is there anything I can do
> to help debug this?
>
> I have tried the latest com32 code from git and it did not help, btw.
>
> Thanks!
> --Pat
>
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