Yep. That's it. Isolinux vs. syslinux. My newer boxes have no problem, but if I get the syslinux image, it will work anywhere. A distro like DSL (Damn Small Linux) and IPCop HAS to release in syslinux format because of the amount of people using it that have older PCs and laptops. I'm actually surprised that Ubuntu doesn't do the same, since they are trying to make a distro for everybody, especially 3rd world countries that take in a lot of the recycled hardware.
-----Original Message----- From: On Behalf Of Charles Steinkuehler Sent: Monday, April 10, 2006 11:40 PM
Brian Kelsay wrote:
This problem booting tips me off to one problem I've run
into on older
PCs with newer distros. I was a frequent user of DSL on a laptop until a new version came out and it wouldn't boot. I skipped a version or two and then came back. It turns out that a lot of people
had a problem. I don't recall the exact reason, but now they release
two .iso files and the one that works has syslinux in the title and it has something to do with how the kernel is bootstrapped. Can someone else explain?
Kind of grasping at straws, but there are several ways to boot off of a CD. Syslinux is generally a floppy-based (or at least FAT-12/16) boot loader, which would typically be used on a CD-Rom in floppy emulation mode. In this boot method, a chunk of data on the CD gets read into memory and used by the BIOS to emulate a floppy disk.
Other methods of making bootable CDs include using a hard-disk image for emulation (instead of a floppy), or not using an emulated disk at all.
I suspect the newer images used isolinux or something that does a no emulation (or hard-disk emulation) boot that older BIOSes didn't generally support very well, while using syslinux on an emulated floppy image should generally work anywhere, even on older machines with wacky BIOSes (you're just limited to a maximum 2880K floppy image).
See the mkisofs man page for details on the -b, -hard-disk-boot,
- -no-emul-boot, -boot-load*, and -c switches (and probably others).
Charles Steinkuehler
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Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO