The following boot disks fail to boot, on a certain computer I have (they boot ok on the other):

all DOS boot disks + Tom's Boot Disk (Linux)

Therefore, except some motherboard programs, many programs do not start at all, since they rely upon loading DOS with all its drivers, and that fails.

The error message is the following:

"- InitDisk

Invalid Opcode at 0074 D000 0046 2074 D800 0000 01FF 0100 5411 0000 0BA6 0000 0B96"

So, UBCD 4.0.3 boots ok on AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (overclocked 10%) with mobo Asrock ALiveNF6G-DVI (nForce 430 chipset), 1 GB DDR2, 1 IDE HDD + 1 IDE DVD+/-RW.

UBCD 4.0.3 fails to boot on AMD Athlon XP 3200+ (no overclock), ASUS A7V600-X mobo (with VIA Apollo KT600 chipset), 1 GB RAM, 1 SATA-II HDD (running at SATA-I), 1 IDE HDD, 1 IDE DVD+/-RW and 1 IDE DVD-RAM. I can only boot from slave drive (DVD-RAM), since the DVD+/-RW ceased to read cds.

That DVD-RAM is seen as drive 9F.

Is the bios up to date ? (version 1009)

_________________
Hammerite Compendium of Precepts, Regimens and Rules of Conduct, Vol. 113 :
A stroke of thy chisel, once made, canst be undone, but a stroke thou dost not make from fear is a worse flaw.
Be not cautious - be correct.

Yes. It is up-to-date since a long time.

Erf
Then I have no idea what could cause it, sorry :/
Maybe Victor will know...

_________________
Hammerite Compendium of Precepts, Regimens and Rules of Conduct, Vol. 113 :
A stroke of thy chisel, once made, canst be undone, but a stroke thou dost not make from fear is a worse flaw.
Be not cautious - be correct.

Problem persists in UBCD version 4.1.0:

LZ-DOS boot disk 4.30 fails to boot, mentioning:


- InitDisk
Invalid Opcode at 0074 D000 0046 2074 D800 0000 01FF 0100 5411 0000 0BA6 0000 0B96


Then, Ctrl-Alt-Del is able to reboot the computer.

OpenDOS 4.30: fails to boot with no message; Ctrl-Alt-Del does not work;

FreeDOS 4.30 fails to boot mentioning:


could not find ramdisk image /images/fdubcd.igz


Ctrl-Alt-Del does not work

Netware: fails to boot, gives the first message listed above; Ctrl-Alt-Del works;

Bart: same as Netware;

Tom Boot fails to boot with the message:


LIL


Ctrl-Alt-Del does not work.

Basic Linux: boots fine; console works.

Trinux: cannot configure network, for the rest it boots fine; console works.

Not sure why the DOS disks won't boot on your machine, but I just realized I forgot to update the DOS boot disk menu when I switched FreeDOS and LZ-DOS, so the option for LZ-DOS is now booting FreeDOS, and the option for FreeDOS is pointing to the wrong filename. I will release a patch to fix this soon.

I'm downloading version 4.1.1. Thanks for referring to me in giving credits for this discovery.

Maybe it comes a bit late, but I say it nevertheless:

I was able to start UBCD 4.1.0 on that problematic computer, after I have removed that SATA drive from it. After putting the drive back in, it failed to boot, again.

Funny is that thanks to working about this issue, I detected a wrong jumper setting, which made the harddisk function at about 70 degrees Celsius (Fahrenheit 158 degrees). Now I have put the jumper in the proper position, and temperature is back to normal.

All honor for this issue goes to Western Digital, whose disk could work for years at 70 C. It is a Caviar SE 160 GB SATA-II JS1600. Simply put the jumpers as it is written on the cover of the hard-disk and ignore other advanced options. Namely, I use now Opt1 (5-6) and SSE - Spread Spectrum enabled (1-2). Using SSE+PM (jumper at 3-4) makes the drive very hot.

Problem persists in UBCD 4.1.1.

So, those boot disks fail to boot when:

- SATA disk is present, *and*:
- ATA boot ROM is enabled.

This boils down to: if the BIOS/DOS is able to access the SATA drive, then those boot disks fail to boot.

Normally, that SATA disk is seen as drive 80h (0x80).

The option "ATA device first" does not make any difference, regardless if it is set on "yes" or it is set on "no".

Btw, when configuring GRUB to boot the Knoppix HD installation, the automatically generated list of devices sees SATA HD as 81h and IDE HD as 80h, which is of course wrong; it is the other way arround. That's why I have manually changed device number to 80h for SATA and 81h for IDE, in the devices list of GRUB for Windows.

I consulted the FAQ. There it says that if you want to access SATA drives, you have to set them in BIOS menu as pseudo-IDE drives.

My motherboard does not have pseudo-IDE mode for SATA drives, that's why it gives problems when UBCD tries to access SATA drives.

So, I think this is the big difference between MS-DOS 7.10 or Windows 98 SE boot diskette and FreeDOS and such: MS-DOS can properly access SATA drives in SATA mode, while FreeDOS and such fail to access such drives.

How should I brew my own UBCD version with MS-DOS in place of FreeDOS? I tried to make a 2.88 floppy as indicated, make a MS-DOS system out of it, copy the files from FreeDOS floppy image and put it back to UBCD. Well, it gave an error message that there is not enough place for all the files (of course, FreeDOS system files excluded). The resulting CD is such that this diskette image cannot boot when starting it from UBCD.

Perhaps I should simply put there a Windows 98 SE boot floppy, and boot from it.

I saved two Windows ME/98SE boot images (one 1.44 MB and the other 2.88 MB), as boot.img in the custom folder.

The SATA harddisk was available and enabled in BIOS options.

UBCD did not properly boot the custom boot image.

One of them had a menu like:

1. Boot from harddisk
2. Boot from CD-ROM

The menu did work ok, but neither option 1 nor 2 worked.

The other boot image, which had no such menu, simply did not work at all.

So, I guess, there is some problem with the boot image loader, when it tries to load boot images, and SATA drive works in real SATA mode.

Did you try the usual memdisk params? eg. raw, bigraw, safeint etc.

No, I did not try those parameters. I will seek to use them and then I will say if it works.

I to have the same issue i.e. booting from CD works fine, however booting from USB stick fails with "Invalid OPcode at 0007 ..... ...." error after loading up the FreeDOS OS. The problems is not on all PCs though - desktops seem to work fine (even with SATA drives) where as laptops seem to suffer from the issue. As far as I can tell the issue seems to be how the BIOS is interpreting the USB device (i.e as a hard drive or "other" device). The questions is, is it the BIOS that is at fault here (by the way the BIOS is uptodate) or is it todo with the way FreeDOS is seeing the USB device on certasin BIOS's. Perhasp the USB memeory sticks are being presented differently under different BIOSs?

Perhaps a different approach may be worth a try e.g loading all the freedos stuff into a vritual RAM drive and loading it from theret?

Here is a list of harware that I have had the issue on:-

IBM Lenova T60
Fujutsu Seimens Lifebook E8110

Bye the way thanks for great product - it has saved me hours of time

regards

Alistair

I have the same problem. I have UBCD v 4.1.1 installed on a USB drive, and I'm using it on a Thinkpad T41. None of the versions of DOS boot (I tried FreeDOS, LZ-DOS, and OpenDOS). FreeDOS gives the message:

.....
[GNU License message]
-InitDisk
Invalid opcode at 00D7 0624 0212 4080 0002 0000 0000 (all zeroes for a while)

The other DOS-es just die quietly. Tom's Linux seems to work without any problems.

Any ideas what I could try to do?

Anyone has a good solution?

I have the same problem if UBCD is installed on an USB Harddisk

i got the same problem on a IBM t61

Add the raw parameter to memdisk.
http://ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1845

_________________
Download Ultimate Boot CD v5.0: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
Use Parted Magic for handling all partitioning task: http://partedmagic.com/

i tried adding raw to memdisk, is there any other ideas.

Replace MEMDISK with the version from Syslinux 3.83-pre3 (or higher).
See this tread: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=8543&view=getlastpost

Let me know if it works (also when it doesn't work).

_________________
Download Ultimate Boot CD v5.0: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
Use Parted Magic for handling all partitioning task: http://partedmagic.com/