[Ham-Linux] Unable to boot Linux CDs

[Jason A Miller]

Here are a couple of additional thoughts on this topic:

1) Though I am not familiar with many of the more popular distros, I
have been using Slackware for many years and have also developed my own
distro. There is a parameter that is passed to 'mkisofs' when the CD
images are created that tells it what size to make the boot loader. It
used to be (until about a year ago) that Slackware used 4K boot loaders
on their boot images. That number has now been increased to 32 because
it is thought that will be more compatible with many newer BIOS's. If
you have another Linux box sitting around which you could use to make
the CD images, pass '-boot-load-size 4' to mkisofs when you create the
images. Some BIOS's expect different sizes of boot loaders on bootable
removable media, but 4K seems to be the de-facto standard size.

2) If it won't boot at all (i.e. doesn't see that there's a bootable CD
in the drive), it's probably the device's boot order. As someone else
had previously mentioned, almost all modern BIOS's allow you to set the
priority for boot devices. Set the first as CD/DVD. If it freezes at
boot after doing this, it's probably due to the boot loader size of the
CD image (see above).

Hope you found this helpful.

73


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Jason A Miller
              IRC/IM Nick: Linuxdevr
Open Source Software Developer
      Amateur Radio Callsign: KB7YWI
Email: Linuxdevr at nerdshack.com
     Ham Radio Email: kb7ywi at qsl.net

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