Unhumanje

As I already said in my previous post, it is not a good idea to put different OSes and Tools onto the same USB drive, because in doing so, YUMI and other tools have to move the files to seperate folders in order to prevent name collisions. But doing so breaks routines with hard coded paths and you won't know about that until you are halfway through the installation process.

If you really want to have multiple OSes an Tools on a single pendrive, you can still partition it and install a bootmanager like grub4dos. But then again why not get a couple of smaller usb drives? This is probably even more cost effective.

PS: this really sounds like a bios problem to me. But it is kind of akward, because I was under the impression that as long as there is some magic boot sequence on the drive the bios will (try to) boot it. Have you tried to booting the pendrive on another PC, not just Qemu?

Yes - it works on other laptops. I'm making some progress though - I now believe that it is indeed a BIOS problem, but not with syslinux, but with the way the flash drives are formatted - logical/primary and actually in which sector the syslinux.cfg and other menu files are written at... I did a complete flash drive wipe - DDoD 5220.22.-M (3 passes) - formatted to fat32 primary - and manually moved the files required, but moved syslinux.cfg and the menu files first - and now it booted ...

Three things to consider:

1) Full wipe

2) Must be a PRIMARY partition, formatted in fat32(obvious)

3) The required syslinux/multiboot files must be written in very early - in one of the first sectors

Not really sure how this works, but as said, without doing this, the flash drive works on other PC's, but not on this one (so this BIOS).

Well, I haven't heard of such an issue before, but I had troubles with such tolls as YUMI, Xboot or unetbootin. The problems usually arised, because the pendrives wouldn't boot at all or because the installers didn't preserve the folder structures exactly, which lead to problems during the installation.

In the past I switched to a somewhat different installation procedure, which unfortunately isn't suported by all computers.

You can write an 1:1 copy of an cdrom iso onto a pendrive with dd (if you don't know dd, it is a tool for low level copying) and most computers will boot it just fine.

x being the letter of your usb pendrive and NOT your harddrive, you can also append bs=10M for bigger than default blocksize, for increased speed.

If you are running Windows and no GNU/Linux, you need to get dd first (and you might want to add it you your systems path variable). You can get it with the Unix tools for Windows or Cygwin, both worked for me.

PS: If you find out what really caused your problems, I'd be glad to hear from you.

I will try this out, but that doesn't solve my problem entirely. This way I can only have 1 OS per pendrive, and my initial intentions were to have several OSes and Tools on a single pendrive, by using XBoot for example (I've tried YUMI as well). What lead me to believe that the BIOS is the problem is that:

1) Once the drive is successfully populated with tools/OSes - qemu runs it under windows and it shows the syslinux bootloader and everything works. However, while running physically - BIOS returns Boot error.

2) A few other people with the same laptop (and bios) reporting similar problems.

Effectively, I think there is some incompatibility between the BIOS and Syslinux

I have never encountered or heard of such an issue.

I have a few flash drives - I've tried installing a few different OS-es or tools via unetbootin and XBOOT which use syslinux as bootloader, and it never works. BIOS returns Boot Error. However, anything with a GRUB boot loader works

I haven't yet discovered how to fix this.

Is there a way to fix the syslinux boot error with this (gx740)? Also this 5 posts limit is annoying :/