Bug#46533: Let's make non-syslinux rescue floppies available, too.
Ganesh Sundaresan <Ganesh.Sundaresan@quantum.com> writes:
> Here's the motivation: I have seen at least two motherboards that don't like
> the standard rescue floppy supplied with slink. This one uses "syslinux".
> One recent example is documented in my response to bug 45507. When I make a
> rescue floppy using an alternative boot method, e.g. "kernel", with the
> "mkrboot" tool, I find that it works fine on these motherboards. This
> alternative rescue floppy uses the same kernel and "root.bin" as the
> standard syslinux-based floppy. Only the boot method is different.
>
> I suspect these problems have nothing to do with "syslinux" and everything
> to do with quirky BIOS drivers. In any case, supplying alternative rescue
> floppies may benefit some people who are bringing up Debian for the first
> time. It's possible they don't have access to another system running Linux,
> so they can't be expected to cook their own rescue floppy.
Ganesh, I completely agree with your diagnosis. There are really
quite a lot of people who are able to boot with SUSE or RedHat but for
some reason can't boot with our stuff (generally hanging when it tries
to load root.bin, or right at the front when it loads the kernel).
I find these problems impossible to diagnose, etc. It's strictly an
i386 problem, too.
So if someone is able to hack the rescue disk creation and the top
level makefile so we generate two "flavors" of rescue disk images (one
for mkroot, one for syslinux as we do now), then I'd be very pleased
and Debian users would be too.
Anyone have other thoughts? Volunteers?
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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