[syslinux] DBAN and vesamenu.c32

H. Peter Anvin
Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:49:06 -0000

Henry Kemp wrote:
> I'm integrating DBAN (http://dban.sourceforge.net/) into our PXE boot
> menu system (using vesamenu.c32) but it just hangs when I'm using
> vesamenu.c32 and confusingly when I revert our menu system to using
> vesa.c32 it works ok. I've stripped out any extraneous configuration
but
> it still seems to have the same problem.
>
> When I use this in pxelinux.cfg it boots into DBAN ok:
>
>   default menu.c32
>
>   LABEL DBAN-1.0.7-i386
>         KERNEL images/dban/vmlinuz
>         MENU LABEL DBAN-1.0.7-i386
>         APPEND init=/rc nuke=dwipe floppy=0,16,cmos root=/dev/ram0
> initrd=images/dban/initrd.img
>
> But when I change menu.c32 to vesamenu.c32 and select the DBAN option
> from the menu I just get a cursor at the bottom left of the screen and
> it hangs there indefinitely...

> The system I'm testing it on is a VMWare virtual machine so I don't
> think that is necessarily an issue. The tftp server is running on Centos
> 5.1 thats fully up to date with patches.

What version of syslinux are you running, and do you know what version
of the Linux kernel DBAN uses?

It sounds like it doesn't revert to text mode (you get a *graphical*
cursor, right?) and then DBAN gets confused about the resulting mode.
The screen is supposed to revert to text mode before being handed over,
so this is odd.

The other option I can think of is a memory collision.  Is this on a
small-memory machine?

	-hpa