Workstation Fails to Boot Off Imaging CD

  • 3614499
  • 21-Feb-2007
  • 30-Apr-2012

Environment


Novell ZENworks 7 Desktop Management Support Pack 1 - ZDM7 SP1 Imaging

Situation

Workstation would not boot off the imaging CD

Workstation was an older PC, and the bootcd.iso needed to be made with the following parameters, "-no-emul-boot" and "-boot-load-size 4".

Resolution

Remade the bootcd.iso by using the following steps on a PC running Linux as the user root.

1. dell340:~ # ls bootcd.iso (For this example the bootcd.isois in root's home directory)
bootcd.iso

2. dell340:~ # mkdir temp (Make a directory called temp in root's home directory)

3. dell340:~ # mount -o loop bootcd.iso temp/ (The mount command used to mount the bootcd.iso to a mount point. We are using the temp directory created in Step #2 as our mount point)

4. dell340:~ # mkdir hp (Make another temporary directory called hp in root's home directory)

5. dell340:~ # cp -R temp/* hp/ (Command to copy the files from the mounted bootcd.iso, including the subdirectories to the temporary directory created in Step #4. The -R is the recursive switch.)

6. dell340:~ # chmod -R 777 hp/* (Need to change the permissions including the files in the subdirectories. The -R is the recursive switch.)

7. dell340:~ # cd hp/ (Change directory to the temporary directory created in Step #4)

8. dell340:~/hp # rm boot.cat (man pages says make sure the specified filename does not conflict with an existing file)

9. dell340:~/hp # mkisofs -o /root/test.iso -b boot/loader/isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table . <==== ***(DON'T forget the ENDING PERIOD!)***
INFO: UTF-8 character encoding detected by locale settings.
Assuming UTF-8 encoded filenames on source filesystem,
use -input-charset to override.
Size of boot image is 4 sectors -> No emulation
20.29% done, estimate finish Fri Feb 16 20:15:44 2007
40.60% done, estimate finish Fri Feb 16 20:15:46 2007
60.85% done, estimate finish Fri Feb 16 20:15:45 2007
81.15% done, estimate finish Fri Feb 16 20:15:45 2007
Total translation table size: 2048
Total rockridge attributes bytes: 0
Total directory bytes: 12288
Path table size(bytes): 76
Max brk space used 0
24656 extents written (48 MB)

You will now have a new iso image called test.iso in /root/ (root's home directory).
***File size may be different depending on size of orginal size of the bootcd.iso.

10. dell340:~/hp # umount /root/tmp/ (umount the bootcd.iso mounted in Step #3)

11. Burn test.iso to a CD using your favorite CD burning software.


Additional Information

DON'T forget the ENDING PERIOD (.) at the end of the "mkisofs" command.

The following is from the man pages of mkisofs.

-no-emul-boot
Specifies that the boot image used to create "El Torito"
bootable CDs is a 'no emulation' image. The system will load and
execute this image without performing any disk emulation.

-boot-load-size load_sectors
Specifies the number of "virtual" (512-byte) sectors to load in
no-emulation mode. The default is to load the entire boot file.
Some BIOSes may have problems if this is not a multiple of 4.