> >On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 06:42:19PM +0000, Stuart Henderson wrote: > >> On 2007/10/29 10:49, Austin Hook wrote: > >> > I understand that some people have experienced boot problems with CD #1 > >> > in > >> > the new 4.2 release set, mainly with older machines. > >> [...] > >> So, it may be worth someone with an affected machine trying to boot > >> CD 2 and if the boot loader does start up, pause it (just hit space or > >> something), swap to CD 1, and continue by typing 'boot'. > > > >Worked for me. Thanks! (Also you need to 'set image /4.2/i386/bsd.rd'.) > > > > Ahhh, yes! Muggins me forgot the set image bit. Too much hurry. > Thanks.
I believe I know what the issue is, so that I can ensure that it does not happen in the 4.3 release (and future releases). My guess is that some older BIOS's cannot handle a boot.catalog that is more than 32768 2K blocks into the filesystem image. By chance, in this release it is beyond that line by a little bit, for the first time. On the amd64 CD boot.catalog is in front of that line, but cdbr is beyond that line. mkhybrid does not try to avoid this problem. I will see if there is new code to handle this, but in the meantime I also have another workaround which will ensure that future releases don't run into this problem.
