Syslinux - May 2009 - syslinux-3.80-1 will not boot from usb drive on Intel 845 motherboard

I tried formating a 1 gig usb flash drive as fat 16 under fedora 9
using gparted-0.4.3-1.fc9.i386 and syslinux-3.80-1.i386 and and the
drive will not boot.

No error message, no nothing from Syslinux.

There's only a slight pause as if the bios is looking at the usb drive
and the bootloader syslinux created but can't seem to make heads or
tails of it and then grub boots up  from the mbr of the hard drive and
proceeds to boot fedora 9 as if the usb drive wasn't present.

I know the bios will boot usb drives since drives formatted under
Windows 98se and Windows XP Home  and made bootable will boot with no
problems on this machine.

I heard that some of the people who are working on Syslinux are
working at Intel and if so, maybe they could find out what the problem
could be if it's in fact a Syslinux/BIOS problem.


The motherboard BIOS is: VA84510A.86A.0050.P18

Chris Lee wrote:
> I tried formating a 1 gig usb flash drive as fat 16 under fedora 9
> using gparted-0.4.3-1.fc9.i386 and syslinux-3.80-1.i386 and and the
> drive will not boot.
> 
> No error message, no nothing from Syslinux.
Did you install an MBR on the disk?

dd if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/... bs=440 count=1

Also make sure that your FAT16 partition is marked active.

	-hpa

-- 
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel.  I don't speak on their behalf.