Bug 751539

(In reply to comment #0)
> 1. I create working USB stick with Fedora iso using dd command.
> I know the image is on the USB stick correctly copied, as I
> installed from it on different PC.

0) Does your machine boot the live USB stick if you create it with livecd-iso-to-disk (from the livecd-tools package)? 

1) Background: the live CD uses isolinux as a bootloader (and so does the live USB stick if you dd that image onto it). livecd-iso-to-disk uses syslinux as a bootloader (I seem to remember that there will be isolinux related files on the stick, but these should be unused).

It would be nice to know whether this is isolinux specific. Note that the live CD image is an "hybrid image" (it can be booted both as a CD-ROM and as a hard disk) and perhaps this BIOS doesn't grok its - a bit hackish - format.

0) Some notes for future reference.

1) Fedora-12-i686-Live.iso uses "ISOLINUX 3.75 2009-04-16". Fedora-13-i686-Live.iso uses "ISOLINUX 3.84 2009-12-18".

2) Quite a bit changed between 3.75 and 3.84:
git log --oneline --no-merges syslinux-3.75..syslinux-3.84 -- core/isolinux* utils/isohybrid*
a40b707 isohybrid: make the -offset option actually work
d59d154 isohybrid: convert -id to a binary string
63916a5 isolinux: can't clobber edx when dx contains the drive number...
6b7aa8e isolinux: bsHidden can't be in data; it is set before checksumming
e17db13 isolinux: handle systems which disables interrupts in El Torito
f92916d isohybrid: make isolinux.bin and isohybrid two-way compatible
177b65b isohybrid: we are backwards compatible again, change the error msg
bb519a9 isohybrid: revert to a stack format compatible with previous version
e462c28 isohybrid: support booting from partition; fix CBIOS booting
d4d9f19 isohybrid: allow selecting the _c and _f versions of the prefix
aee4e8f isohybrid: add options, change default ptype to 0x17
4826c90 Try to HLT the processor during idle
9a70458 isohybrid: preserve MBR id in isohybrid
a54e6fe isohybrid: support iso images over 2GB
dfa562b ISOLINUX: set directory length correctly
3193753 Global whitespace cleanup.
3a1bc74 core: move vgafontbuf out of the zero segment
7474bc5 core: add alignz macro (analogous to "alignb") for zero-pad align

> 0) Does your machine boot the live USB stick if you create it with
> livecd-iso-to-disk (from the livecd-tools package)? 

Oh cool! Yes, it does!

(In reply to comment #3)
> > 0) Does your machine boot the live USB stick if you create it with
> > livecd-iso-to-disk (from the livecd-tools package)? 
> 
> Oh cool! Yes, it does!

0) So now we're certain it's an isolinux problem.

1) Lukas, if you think this problem is interesting and don't mind spending a lot of time fiddling with your laptop and USB stick we might be able to pinpoint the change that broke isolinux for this BIOS (between version 3.75 and 3.84). Pinpointing that change doesn't mean things get fixed: eg, it might be a change that's important to a lot of other machines and the conclusion could just as well be that this BIOS is broken.

2) If you're happy with the workaround feel free to close this report (with an appropriate resolution, perhaps WORKSFORME or NOTABUG). Otherwise we could try to pinpoint this bug.

Paul, 

if you don't mind to get the answers regarding pinpointing the bug only on weekends (when I have access to that laptop), let's go for it and let's bisect the bug. I can do the testing. If you are interested, I'm interested too.

(In reply to comment #5)
> if you don't mind to get the answers regarding pinpointing the bug only on
> weekends (when I have access to that laptop), let's go for it and let's bisect
> the bug. I can do the testing. If you are interested, I'm interested too.

0) My first suggestion would be to rebuild (say) the F16 live CD with isolinux from syslinux-4.05. (For testing you can drop almost everything from that live CD. You could even drop the kernel and the initrd. Since once you get past the BIOS and see that isolinux is running you're done testing. That way you'll end up with a very small iso.) 

1) You have to rebuild syslinux (using the 4.05 sources) to do that.

2) If the laptop still doesn't boot with isolinux 4.05 we'll have to ask around on the syslinux mailinglist to see how to best proceed from there (eg, whether you should first try to bisect the 3.75 - 3.84 changes looking for the commit that caused this issue).

3) Feel free to send me an email if you run into problems. No need to clutter bugzilla with questions not directly related to this issue.

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