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

[Marr]

On Sunday 20 June 2004 01:16am, somercet at core.com wrote:
> 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

I stand corrected. I was misled by a saved Google post from June 2002 (when 
the problem first appeared in Slackware 8.1) which said:

> In the 8.1 distro, the 2.88MB floppy emulation is not used. 
> This is the boot mechanism used in earlier CD-ROM bootable 
> computers. Now we use isolinux, which doesn't use the 
> El Torito standard.

Indeed, the "No Emulation Booting" method (e.g. ISOLINUX) is even mentioned in 
the '"El Torito" Bootable CD-ROM Format' specification from Phoenix and IBM, 
which I don't think I looked at since late 2000 when I first downloaded it.

> 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.

This is interesting. I notice that the 'man mkisofs' page says:

> Some BIOSes may have problems if this is not a multiple of 4.

It seems like CD-ROM booting is more confusing and inconsistent than it should 
be.  It might be insteresting to explore this sometime -- ahh, so many 
questions, so little time!  :^)

Thanks for correcting my error and for supplying the additional information -- 
much appreciated.

Bill Marr