Stuff that has not yet gone into the official build.
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fsmithred

- fsmithred
- Posts: 2101
- Joined: Wed Mar 09, 2011 9:13 pm

## syslinux weirdness

Sun Dec 07, 2014 2:49 pm

First - I made a live-usb of jessie-sysv using refracta2usb-0.9.6 in wheezy.
On booting into the usb, I get error messages about chain.c32 and vesamenu.c32, along with a boot prompt. (no menu). Typing "live" and hitting enter boots the system. I assume that the problem is the syslinux bootloader from wheezy doesn't match the syslinux files from jessie/sid.
Remove chain.c32 and the "boot hard disk" menu entry, replace vesamenu.c32 and isolinux.bin with the versions from wheezy, and it boots.
I then tried it again, running refracta2usb-0.9.6sid2 in jessie-sysv inside vbox. So the bootloader matched the other files. It may be significant that the syslinux command never finished and I lost mouse and keyboard control inside the VM, so I killed the VM.
When I booted the usb stick, I got the boot prompt with an error message about not finding isolinux/vesamenu.c32. Uh... this is a usb - the files are in /syslinux, not /isolinux. After some experimentation with copying or renaming these directories, it seems that both isolinux and syslinux folders are needed to get the boot menu. The two directories are identical now, with the exception of isolinux.cfg and syslinux.cfg, which are identical files except in name.
I'm gonna install jessie-sysv to hardware and try it again.
thwak

- thwak
- Posts: 174
- Joined: Tue Nov 20, 2012 3:58 am

## Re: syslinux weirdness

Sun Dec 07, 2014 3:25 pm

sounds similar to:
Nov 10, 2014 "The latest syslinux in antiX-14-a3 breaks our bootloader"
http://antix.freeforums.org/the-latest- ... t5371.html
fsmithred

- fsmithred
- Posts: 2101
- Joined: Wed Mar 09, 2011 9:13 pm

## Re: syslinux weirdness

Mon Dec 08, 2014 12:12 am

Yeah, similar. Lots of changes in the new syslinux.
I installed jessie-sysv on hardware, ran r2u, made a bootable usb. The sid3 version of refracta2usb will work (once I get the bugs out.) It only needs a /syslinux folder in the root. Not both syslinux and isolinux.
Bugs - mainly the tests for checking the device. I had trouble with the test using '/sbin/fsck -N'. I mistakenly formatted the first partition as ext2, and then when I reformatted it as fat32, fsck still saw it as ext2. Had to delete the partition and make a new one. All of this was in gparted, which is another problem.
Apparently, unprivileged user can't use the 'which' command for commands not in user's path. That's used in the test to see if gparted is installed. Had to change it to 'if [[ -f /usr/sbin/gparted ]]'.
Other thing that didn't work right was 'syslinux -d syslinux'. Had to run that afterward as root.
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