[KLUG Members] strange reaction to effort to boot from CD

[Marr]

On Friday 18 June 2004 04:30pm, Eric Beversluis wrote:
> I've had trouble on an old laptop booting from CDs. At first I thought
> it was the CD, but it's happened on brand new ones I just got from
> Bruce.
>
> I get a screen full of messages as ff:
>
> isolinux: Found something at drive = [followed by a hex numeral][a whole
> screen full of these messages, each with a different numeral at the end]
> ...
> isolinux: Found something at drive = [ " ]
> isolinux: Looks like it might be something right, continuing . . .
> [ellipses in original]
> isolinux: Disk error 04, AX=42D0, drive 9F
> Boot failed: press a key to retry.
>
> Anyone recognize what this might be? (BIOS is set to boot from CD)
> Eric Beversluis

Eric,

I cannot be certain, but this sounds somewhat similar to a problem I had back 
in July 2002 trying to install Slackware 8.1 (by booting from an 
ISOLINUX-based CD-ROM disc) on a machine with a BIOS that wasn't fully 
compliant.

IIRC, beginning with Slackware 8.1, the 1.44/2.88MB floppy emulation for 
booting from CD-ROM was dropped in favor of ISOLINUX (which allows larger 
boot images and doesn't use the El Torito standard).  This worked fine on 
most of my machines, but my Dell 'L400c' PC couldn't handle it.  Some online 
investigation showed that this was reported to be a BIOS problem, implying 
that the BIOS didn't fully support booting from a "no-emulation" boot image.

Aside: When I finally upgraded that machine to Slackware 9.1 (having skipped 
the 9.0 release on that little-used machine), the ISOLINUX thing was no 
longer a problem, presumably (guessing here) because Slackware had reverted 
to the older 1.44/2.88MB floppy emulation booting method for the CD-ROM 
discs.

Bill Marr