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

[somercet at core.com]

On Sat, Jun 19, 2004 at 12:01:28PM -0400, Marr was only escaped
   alone to tell thee:

> 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).

No, ISOLINUX is El Torito compliant; some BIOSes, however, need
emulated floppies.

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/

will run from a floppy and locate and load your ISOLINUX for you. Note
that Smart Boot Manager doesn't load kernels, only bootloaders e.g.
LILO, grub, ISOLINUX, &c.

> When I finally upgraded that machine to Slackware 9.1 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.
 
Apparently not for Slack 10:

http://sunsite.ulatina.ac.cr/Unix/Linux/Slackware/slackware-current/isolinux/

has some interesting notes. They still set "-b isolinux/isolinux.bin"
and "-no-emul-boot": the first enables El Torito, the second tells
mkisofs that isolinux.bin is not a floppy image.

Also, this may pinpoint the problem:

   Techincally the --boot-load-size should be a lot bigger, like 20 or
   so in order to hold the isolinux.bin boot block.  However, setting it
   to 4 causes it to load on more BIOSes.  I don't know why, but I've
   had so many people report this to me that I'm inclined to believe it.
   But, if the resulting discs don't boot in your machine and you find
   that using a more correct value here fixes it, please let me know!
   If it's going to be broken for some BIOSes either way, I'd rather be
   correct.

-- 
I am not a Pillar, but a Buttress, of the Established
Church. I support it from without. -- Lord Melbourne