Syslinux - Dec 2012 - A Couple Questions About a New Project

My compliments on the release of syslinux-5.0 and happy holidays to the
entire Syslinux team.? I have a longer message in me.? Lots of
curiousity about the direction of the project, but that will have to
wait until I finish my first 5.0 project (*not* my first Syslinux
project), which just happens to touch past problems: drive
enumeration.

This particular effort is on a USB flash drive, with two partitions:? an
NTFS pasrtition and an ext2 partition.? /boot/syslinux lives on the
[first] NTFS partition with a bunch of other files, while the other
partition contains a live Linux system.

I need help translating this stanza (from a working isolinux.cfg) to
access the vmlinuz on ext2 partition:

KERNEL /pclos2/vmlinuz
APPEND livecd=/pclos2/livecd initrd=/pclos2/initrd.gz root=/dev/rd/3 acpi=on
vga=788 keyb=us vmalloc=256M nokmsboot home=usb splash=no

The problem is how one references sub-directories on a different
partition.

One more thing: the DVD that uses the above stanza has another stanza
that boots the C: drive, which won't work from a Syslinux flash drive.
My goal is to simply transfer control to the bootable partition of the
1st hard drive:

LABEL bootc
MENU LABEL ^Boot from C:
MENU DEFAULT
TEXT HELP
Boot the default OS on the C: drive....
ENDTEXT
KERNEL /boot/syslinux/chain.c32
APPEND hd0 0

These are the only operational issues with Syslinux I can recall, after
several years of using the system.

Thanks in advance for your attention and my best regards during the
holiday season.

"Mr Roboto" <mr-roboto at linuxmail.org> writes:
> The problem is how one references sub-directories on a different
> partition.
That is possible with the multidisk support written by a student of
Google Summer of Code 2012.

Since I don't see Syslinux code for a while already, I believe multidisk
support has not been pushed out yet due to some missing features/fixes
for it (not sure though).


-- 
Paulo Alcantara,    ProFUSION Embedded Systems

> ?----- Original Message -----
> ?From: syslinux-request at zytor.com
> ?Sent: 01/01/13 03:00 PM
> ?To: syslinux at zytor.com
> ?Subject: Syslinux Digest, Vol 118, Issue 1
> 
>
>Message: 4
>Date: Tue, 01 Jan 2013 12:22:36 +0000
>From: Matt Fleming <matt at console-pimps.org>
>To: Paulo Alcantara <pcacjr at zytor.com>
>Cc: pcacjr at profusion.mobi, For discussion of Syslinux and tftp-hpa
> <syslinux at zytor.com>
>Subject: Re: [syslinux] A Couple Questions About a New Project
>Message-ID:
> <1357042956.27261.15.camel at mfleming-mobl1.ger.corp.intel.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
>On Thu, 2012-12-27 at 14:42 -0200, Paulo Alcantara wrote:
>> "Mr Roboto" <mr-roboto at linuxmail.org> writes:
>> 
>> > The problem is how one references sub-directories on a different
>> > partition.
>> 
>> That is possible with the multidisk support written by a student of
>> Google Summer of Code 2012.
>> 
>> Since I don't see Syslinux code for a while already, I believe
multidisk
>> support has not been pushed out yet due to some missing features/fixes
>> for it (not sure though).
>
>Correct, I reviewed the initial patch series. I think I remember Andr?
>saying he will work on another version when he finds some spare time.
>
>-- 
>Matt Fleming, Intel Open Source Technology Center
>
>
>
>------------------------------
I believe the above was part of a thread to this question I originally
posed:
>>This particular effort is on a USB flash drive, with two partitions: ?an
>>NTFS pasrtition and an ext2 partition. ?/boot/syslinux lives on the
>>[first] NTFS partition with a bunch of other files, while the other
>>partition contains a live Linux system.
>>
>>I need help translating this stanza (from a working isolinux.cfg) to
>>access the vmlinuz on ext2 partition:
>>
>>KERNEL /pclos2/vmlinuz
>>APPEND livecd=/pclos2/livecd initrd=/pclos2/initrd.gz root=/dev/rd/3
acpi=on vga=788 keyb=us vmalloc=256M nokmsboot home=usb splash=no
>>
>>The problem is how one references sub-directories on a different
>>partition.
Apparently I was misunderstood, my apologies for posing a faulty
question. ?I was trying to determine how to reference another
drive/partition from syslinux.cfg, as in:

KERNEL (hd0,1)/pclos2/vmlinuz
APPEND livecd=(hd0,1)/pclos2/livecd initrd=(hd0,1)/pclos2/initrd.gz
root=/dev/rd/3 acpi=on vga=788 keyb=us vmalloc=256M nokmsboot home=usb splash=no

That's how GRUB does it, relative to a working syslinux.cfg. ?After
further consideration, I "believe" the solution to my two partition
problem is chainloading. ?So we'll put the *original* KERNEL+APPEND
stmts into their own syslinux.cfg and from my Linux system do the
following:

extlinux --install /media/PCLOS26

to install a boot loader so that we can chain to my ext2 partition, from
the boot-time syslinux.cfg, like so:

KERNEL /boot/syslinux/chain.c32
APPEND hd0 1

(For the record, I *did* re-read chain.txt, make the flash drive 
bootable using syslinux.exe and installed syslinux own MBR for laughs.)

Seems simple enough, but after I get the initial Syslinux version msg
(from launching the updated menu pick) a few seconds later, I'm right
back at my original boot menu. ?The flash drive is almost new and was
successfully booting Linux alone without incident (via GRUB.) ?But I'm
confused, as I thought using extlinux made the 2nd partition bootable
and therefore a candidate for chainloading.

Please advise when convenient. ?Thanks in advance and Happy New Year to
all.


---- ?Jet