Bug#46533: Let's make non-syslinux rescue floppies available, too.

[Juan Cespedes <cespedes@debian.org>]

On Sun, Oct 03, 1999 at 02:36:12PM -0400, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> 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/>
--
Juan Cespedes