I'm trying to get syslinux to boot off of a drive. I'm trying to make something similar to floppinux except with more kernel features. I want to actually be able to run compiled gcc programs, view partitions on other drives and possibly get usb drivers for flash drive functionality. It needs to be able to support legacy bios booting as well.
I cannot get syslinux to boot for the life of me. Everything I do boots in qemu just fine but nothing boots on real hardware. I've tried it on a socket 3 ms4144, a dell pentium 4, a X99 motherboard and like every laptop I have. The bios doesn't even recognize it as a bootable device. Even if I use plop boot manager to force boot from a partition that I 100% know has syslinux, it STILL doesn't boot.
The steps I have taken are as follows:
You would think that getting such a thing to even work on something as old as a pentium 4 or socket 3 is probably not possible. Yet there is
floppinux and
this project. I even downloaded and wrote the images from both those projects to a drive and
it even works on my socket 3 486 pc. These both have syslinux and they BOTH boot on exactly the same hardware that I'm trying to get my syslinux concoction to work so it
has to be possible somehow.
Does anyone have any ideas?