RW wrote: > I have a Commell LE564 which will work happily with a serial console > including doing BIOS stuff. > > The BIOS allows use of a USB CD drive and that works too. Well, it > works perfectly if you can just time it right and blindly type in the > magic string to redirect the console to com0 and then you can do all of > the install and thankfully some really kind dev gave us a choice to use > serial console for running the installed OS. > > So I thought it would be cool to modify the CD boot to do the console > switch that I remembered somebody describing some time back, and did > the svnd mount of the cdrom41.fs, added /etc/ and put in a boot.conf > containing "set tty com0". I noted that the image contained /boot and > /bsd as expected. > > I then did mkhybrid with all the buttons and knobs and burned the > resulting ISO to a CD. > Mounting it shows the expected directory structure and when it is > booted it announces that it is using a 2.88 floppy image and then gives > out "ERR M" and locks up. > > I haven't suffered that before and found it in the FAQ but I'm none the > wiser as to what could have happened in a CD boot situation. > > Anybody who has had this problem and worked it through can feel free to > be very superior and lay a clue on me because I'm sure that it is a > painful thing to debug except for the authors of the boot processes.
Well, the ERR M translates to being a message from the PBR which means, roughly: "I grabbed what was hard coded in me to grab, but whatever it was, it sure didn't look like /boot, so I'm giving you the most explicit error message I can, but be glad tom@ wrote this code and not nick@, otherwise you would quickly find that 512 bytes is not much to stick verbose error messages in" So, the question is, why didn't it look like /boot? I'm not entirely sure, but could you have moved/deleted/re-copied the /boot file? Personally, I'd suggest using cd41.iso, and altering the already existing /etc/boot.conf file that is on that. From what we have seen, cd41.iso is actually a bit more compatible with newer systems than the floppy emulation process used on cdrom41.fs's 2.88M floppy. Uh..you DID test that an unaltered cdrom41.fs DOES work, didn't you? I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't -- some machines don't like the floppy emulation at all, some don't like 2.88M floppies, etc. I could easily see a bug producing that error. OH!! USB CD!!! yeah, definitely use the cd41.iso, and/or non-floppy-emulation for your custom bootable CD. It's been a while (and I don't have much to even test it with), but I think the floppy emulation just doesn't work on USB CDROM drives (or was very buggy on many of 'em) Nick.
