Is there an alternative to booting with syslinux?

[perazim]

Is there an alternative to booting with syslinux?

I have spent major time composing a custom F-12 Live USB system only to find upon deployment that it will not boot on quite a few systems. It also seems to me that some of this trouble could be caused by the syslinux bootloader. I notice that the version in F-12 is 3.75 whereas the current version at their homepage is 3.84.

Is there another bootloader that can be used for LIVE USB loading? GRUB?

I am using both persistant overlay and encrypted home.

Thanks,

[Dies]

If you've installed to a USB drive then you can pretty much use any bootloader you want.

As long as the machine you're booting from sees the USB drive and you can select it as the boot device it will work.

This is what I have to do as my motherboard is one of those that doesn't like syslinux.

[JEO]

Around the time of Fedora 8 some boot hang problems with syslinux were worked around by adding one of the following keywords "edd=skipmbr" or "edd=off" to the kernel command line, so you might try that in your syslinux.cfg file on the live usb.

[Gödel]

you can try syslinux 3.83 with 'sudo yum --enablerepo=rawhide install syslinux'.

Grub can be used, grub-install --root-directory=/media/<usbstick> /dev/sdb, but in grub.conf you need to be careful about the root= part, which really needs a LABEL, eg see here for an example.

[perazim]

Installed rawhide version of syslinux 3.83 and now when I boot from USB, I get the boot menu. When I select the F-12 system, the screen blanks and I get the beginning of the F-12 bootup screen - blue with empty globe that should fill with white as the system boots up but it doesn't - just stays empty forever.

Also I tried setting "edd=skipmbr" or "edd=off" with no change.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

[JEO]

If you press ESC key at the time you see the blue screen with empty globe do you see any messages?

[perazim]

Pressing the ESC key has no effect nor anything extra displayed.

[JEO]

As a guess I would say that the kernel is crashing, do the lights on the keyboard start flashing on and off when this happens?

You could try removing the "rhgb" keyword from the kernel command line in your syslinux.cfg file and see if that shows the messages. If that works, you can also remove the word "quiet" to get more verbose messages.

[perazim]

No lights flashing on keyboard. Testing this on a Acer Aspire One AOD250 netbook. Booting stops around the "dracut" lines. Note: it doesn't stop at the same place when booting, just AROUND this place.

Next, I manually created a USB Drive booting with Grub and exactly the same thing happened.

It is occurring to me that I have multiple problems.

So, to isolate this, I have created a "stock" USB Drive from the "stock" F-12-desktop-live iso image. This is using syslinux 3.75-4. It stops EVERY boot at "Starting udev"

Once I get this resolved, I will add back the alterations I made, one at a time.

Thanks all for the help.

---------- Post added at 02:57 AM CST ---------- Previous post was at 02:45 AM CST ----------

Came across this:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=533746

I have two of these netbooks. One works. One doesn't.

Will post final resolution when I find it.

[perazim]

Created custom LIVE image with livecd-creator and copied to USB. This works. Next tried to install from the LIVE-USB to hard drive. Anaconda finished without exception but when system is restarted, it fails part way through bootup sequence.

This is what I see (I had to type this in manually, so it may not be letter perfect):

sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] assuming drive cache: write through
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] assuming drive cache: write through
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] assuming drive cache: write through
sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] assuming drive cache: write through
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 241254720
Buffer I/O Error on dev sdb, logical block 241254720
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 241254720
Buffer I/O Error on dev sdb, logical block 241254720
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 241254720
Buffer I/O Error on dev sdb, logical block 241254720
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 241254720
Buffer I/O Error on dev sdb, logical block 241254720
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 241254720
Buffer I/O Error on dev sdb, logical block 241254720
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 241254720
Buffer I/O Error on dev sdb, logical block 241254720
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 241254720
Buffer I/O Error on dev sdb, logical block 241254720
end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 241254720
Buffer I/O Error on dev sdb, logical block 241254720
Traceback (most recent call last):
File ""/init", line 157 in <module>
if __name__=='__main__': main()
File "/init",line 129, in main
xo_ver=get_xo_version()
File :/init", line 84, in get_xo_version
raise Exception("Not an XO laptop?")
Exception: Not an XO laptop?
Kernel Panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init.
[drm:drm_fb_helper_panic] *ERROR* panic occurred, switching back to text console

I then checked for bad sectors on sdb and found none.

I would have tried the STOCK Fedora 12 LIVE desktop image but it won't boot on my Acer AOD250 (this was subject of a previous thread and resolved by blacklisting some modules)

Thanks

[perazim]

Resolved.

This was caused by conflicting dracut packages being installed in the LIVE compose.