[syslinux] USB boot problems on Gigabyte GA-M55Plus-S3G

Ronald F. Guilmette
Thu, 09 Jan 2014 23:35:58 -0000

I have successfully created bootable USB flash drives containing the
following bootable products:

    1)	Clonezilla (recent version)
    2)  Ultimate Boot CD (recent version)
    3)  OpenELEC (recent version)

All of these apparently use SYSLINUX as part of the boot process.

All three boot up just fine and with no problems at all on virtually all
of the various systems that I have here at my disposal, except for one.

The one system where I am unable to boot from these USB flash drives
contains a Gigabyte GA-M55Plus-S3G motherboard (rev 1.1), which is
running the latest official release BIOS from the manufacturer (F15B).
(I have configured the BIOS on this system so that the first and only
boot device is USB-HDD.)

On this system, when attempting to boot either Clonezilla or OpenELEC
from a USB flash drive, I receive the following messages:

	SYSLINUX 5.10 2013-06-04 ...

	Failed to load ldlinux.c32
	Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue.

In the case of the Ultimate Boot CD, the messages are a bit different:

	SYSLINUX 4.07 2013-07-25 ...

	ERROR: No configuration file found
	No DEFAULT or UI configuration found

As far as I have been able to gather, this sort of thing is a common
problem on various Gigabyte motherboards.

For Clonezilla and OpenELEC at least, I can apparently work-around this
problem by placing a copy of the PLOP Boot manager onto a CD, and then
booting from that CD in the first instance, then using PLOP to boot
from my desired USB flash drive.

I would just like to ask if anybody on this list is at all familiar with
this sort of problem, and whether or not there is a better or simpler
work-around.


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  Whatever is causing the problem, it is clearly not the "fault"
of
SysLinux.  I have also been unable to boot on this same system from a
hard drive containing a good/working/bootable install of Windows 7, but
only when that is detached from its internal sATA connector and then
mounted instead into a perfectly functioning external USB enclosure.
In short it is 100% clear that Gigabyte somehow snafued the part of their
BIOS firmware that was supposed to have provided support for booting from
attached USB devices.  I'd just like to find a work-around so that I
don't
have to spring for a new motherboard just yet.