Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 98395
ISOLinux 2.0.0 hangs on booting from CD in IBM PC330 (8640-ES2)
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:55:25 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; Linux 2.4.20; X11; i686) Description of problem: When booting ISOLinux hangs saying ISOLINUX 2.00 2002-10-25 isolinux: Loading spec packet failed, trying to wing it... isolinux: extreemly broken BIOS detected, last ditch attempt with drive 9F isolinux: Disk error 01, AX = 429B, drive 9F Boot failed: press a key to retry... Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): isolinux 2.00 from RH9.0 (Shrike) How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Insert disc1 into CD drive 2. Power on 3. Actual Results: isolinux hung trying to load boot image Expected Results: isolinux should have loaded image Additional info: Hardware is an IBM PC330 model 8640-ES2 with AIC-7880 scsi controller. CD drive is at target 6, there are 6 SCSI drives attached internally, and have also tried with just 2x drives attached. BIOS is latest level from IBM support website for the PC330.
Sorry, your BIOS is broken and you're going to have to boot from floppy images.
ISOLinux may consider my BIOS broken, but nothing else does. Plus the boot floppies don't work any better. (i.e. they fail even worse. with no real error message, just saying the boot failed & press any key to retry afetr changing the disk). Is there some reason we can't have isolinux fixed to make allowances. Obviously the BIOS isn't completely broken or previous versions (i.e. 7.x) wouldn't boot either.
Your floppy failure just sounds like bad floppies. isolinux uses the hard drive emulation portion of the El Torito standard so that we can actually fit more into the boot image without having to require lots of floppies; unfortunately, there are some BIOSes which just do not properly support this mode, especially from the timeframe which the PC330 is from.