Boot ATA disc from UBCD

Albantar · **Posted:** Mon Oct 20, 2008 5:13 am

First of all, thank you for this amazing tool.

I installed UBCD on a USB stick and it's working fine and dandy, provided the PC in question supports booting from a USB stick of course; I've also got an actual UB[i]CD[/] handy in case I come across a PC that doesn't.

Anyway, many of the laptops I work with now have ATA discs. UBCD provides handy "*Boot from First Hard Disc" options, but these don't work for my laptop with an ATA drive. In fact when selecting First Hard Disc it will reboot from my UBCD USB stick, and when selecting Second Hard Disc it won't boot.

What do I need to APPEND in main.cfg in order to get it to boot from my ATA drive?

Icecube · **Joined:** Fri Jan 11, 2008 2:52 pm **Posts:** 1275

Some text of the syslinux documentation:

Quote:

LOCALBOOT type [ISOLINUX, PXELINUX]
On PXELINUX, specifying "LOCALBOOT 0" instead of a "KERNEL"
option means invoking this particular label will cause a local
disk boot instead of booting a kernel.

The argument 0 means perform a normal boot. The argument 4
will perform a local boot with the Universal Network Driver
Interface (UNDI) driver still resident in memory. Finally,
the argument 5 will perform a local boot with the entire PXE
stack, including the UNDI driver, still resident in memory.
All other values are undefined. If you don't know what the
UNDI or PXE stacks are, don't worry -- you don't want them,
just specify 0.

On ISOLINUX, the "type" specifies the local drive number to
boot from; 0x00 is the primary floppy drive and 0x80 is the
primary hard drive. The special value -1 causes ISOLINUX to
report failure to the BIOS, which, on recent BIOSes, should
mean that the next boot device in the boot sequence should be
activated.

Use:

Code:

LABEL bootnext
    MENU LABEL *Boot Next Device
    LOCALBOOT -1

This only works on newer BIOSes.

Download also the last syslinux version. It contains a lot of extra parameters that you can pass to the chain.c32 command (to boot other hard disks).
http://syslinux.zytor.com/

Albantar · **Posted:** Mon Oct 20, 2008 7:05 am

Ahhh, that got me hopeful. But my BIOS does not support this "next boot device" feature.

It got me looking in other directions and I found that somebody used "APPEND hd31 1" to boot an ATA drive. When I looked around in the Windows Device Manager I found that my Ultra ATA controller is marked as being "Device 31, Function 1" and my S-ATA controller as "Device 31, Function 2". So I tried using "APPEND HD31 2" but that failed too, as dit "APPEND HD31 1" (duh, no Ultra ATA drive in the system) and "APPEND HD31 0" (unable to read MBR).

Boot ATA disc from UBCD

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