Ubuntu and Kubuntu vs. Mepis.... Gentoo?

[Charles Steinkuehler]

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Brian Kelsay wrote:
> This problem booting tips me off to one problem I've run into on older
> PCs with newer distros.  I was a frequent user of DSL on a laptop until
> a new version came out and it wouldn't boot.  I skipped a version or two
> and then came back.  It turns out that a lot of people had a problem.  I
> don't recall the exact reason, but now they release two .iso files and
> the one that works has syslinux in the title and it has something to do
> with how the kernel is bootstrapped.   Can someone else explain?

Kind of grasping at straws, but there are several ways to boot off of a
CD.  Syslinux is generally a floppy-based (or at least FAT-12/16) boot
loader, which would typically be used on a CD-Rom in floppy emulation
mode.  In this boot method, a chunk of data on the CD gets read into
memory and used by the BIOS to emulate a floppy disk.

Other methods of making bootable CDs include using a hard-disk image for
emulation (instead of a floppy), or not using an emulated disk at all.

I suspect the newer images used isolinux or something that does a no
emulation (or hard-disk emulation) boot that older BIOSes didn't
generally support very well, while using syslinux on an emulated floppy
image should generally work anywhere, even on older machines with wacky
BIOSes (you're just limited to a maximum 2880K floppy image).

See the mkisofs man page for details on the -b, -hard-disk-boot,
- -no-emul-boot, -boot-load*, and -c switches (and probably others).

- --
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net
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