mycroes

There's always time to play

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Issues with syslinux

A small followup to my post about a syslinux bootable usb stick, I'm writing down the current issues I have ran into.
1. syslinux is not your average bootloader
2. syslinux on a fat32 usb drive doesn't like to get recognized as USB-FDD

Point 1 is easy to understand. Syslinux is made to be useful in the special cases, not to be useful in about any case. Want to boot to a different kernel? Edit the config file. I think grub is far more userfriendly than syslinux will ever be, so I'm definately doing that grub bootable usb drive soon.

Point 2 is something different... I don't know if grub will work when the system tries to boot from the usb device as if it's a floppy drive. I don't know what's going wrong for syslinux either, but I would not be amazed if either the system or syslinux decides that it can't read beyound 2.88M (or 1.44, but I guess it would at least support large floppy disks). If it's the system, then grub probably won't make any difference at all... So now you might ask, why would you want to boot with usb floppy drive emulation? Well, I don't want to, but it seems some machines have no other option depending on the kind of usb device you use...

Expect a grub multiboot usb drive howto soon.

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