[Sugar-devel] Unbootable machine

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 09:32:48AM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>On 08/30/2009 06:21 AM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>>
>> Please read the following:
>> http://advancemame.sourceforge.net/doc-makebootfat.html#7
>>
>> If you, after reading above, still feel that your questions are 
>> relevant (hint: I don't), then please elaborate on them.
>>
>
>It's an interesting technique -- what he's doing is creating an MBR 
>with a fake FAT superblock.  What it does make me wonder is how many 
>BIOSes end up doing something stupid (e.g. go to a floppy-only mode 
>where INT 13h AH=08h doesn't work right) instead of something right.

Unfortunately I have not stats on the success rate of the technique - on 
the paper it sounds cool, and from the little experimentation I've done 
it acutally succeeded in a few cases to provide me a USB stick that was 
bootable on different BIOSes - which if using syslinux I could only make 
boot on one or the other.

I do not master the details of juggling with this (e.g. I only know that 
INT 13h is "something related to very early BIOS booting...").

So if I have now triggered your interest in this technique, Peter, then 
perhaps we will see interesting funky tricks in syslinux in the future?


;-)

  - Jonas

-- 
* Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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