"Extremely broken BIOS detected" is coming from ISOLINUX which is probing the hardware on the system during the boot sequence of LINUX. If the CD-ROM can be detected or ran using another bootable operating system CD, then the hardware, and the motherboard BIOS are working fine. If you can boot up using a floppy disk with either a type of DOS or a LINUX bootdisk and access the CD-ROM drive, there is nothing wrong with the hardware setup of your system. You have now worked around the software issue with ISOLINUX if the system boots up to LINUX through the floppy boot disk method.
This issue has now become a software problem with ISOLINUX if this is the case. You can try the install again using isolinux-debug.bin and send the codes to the SYSLINUX mailing list by joining the list at
http://www.zytor.com/mailman/listinfo/syslinux and the coders of ISOLINUX will attempt to resolve your issue.
You can also surf through the previous mailing list archives (SYSLINUX Archives) at
http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/syslinux/ which are archived by month and year.
You can also check the "hardware" link at
http://syslinux.zytor.com/ for compatibility that are known issues.
Inherently there are some default configuration options that must be set in all BIOSes with motherboards that have disk/CD-ROM controllers that have the "El Torrito" bootable CD-ROM option. That setting for Adaptec SCSI controllers can be located under the CTRL-A configuration utility during the POST (Power-on Self Test) operation when the system first comes up. The setting "BIOS Support for bootable CD-ROM" must be enabled in "Configure/View Host Adapter Settings"/"Advanced Configuration Options". The enter key and arrow keys of the keyboard is how you navigate and set options with Adaptec controllers. If you have no SCSI hard disks or SCSI removable disks, another setting to change would be "BIOS translation for Int13 Extensions" to disable as ISOLINUX has been known to have problems with Interrupt 13 according to their website.
For systems that have the option in the BIOS to change the boot options, they should be CD, A, Hard Disk or as some BIOSes have it, "C". Then there are the BIOSes that have "SCSI" as an option. So the boot order would be SCSI, A, HDD-0 or C. Even if the BIOS is set to CD and not SCSI for systems that have their CD-ROM drive on the SCSI controller, the system or motherboard BIOS will be bypassed because the SCSI adapter itself has the "El Torrito" bootable CD-ROM option in it's own BIOS. There are yet other systems that need to have the BIOS set to choose "slotted devices first" so the PCI card is looked at before the onboard controllers. That is if there is a PCI adapter with the CD-ROM on it with either IDE/UDMA, S-ATA or embedded SCSI controllers on the motherboard.
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This test was run on a system that has a working SCSI controller that boots a Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition CD fine for the install plus the system boots to a floppy which can access the SCSI CD-ROM drive yet all LINUX installs failed with nearly the same error messages which points to the hardware detection method of ISOLINUX and not the hardware. Here are the errors:
Yoper 2.1
---------
ISOLINUX 2.11 2004-08-16 isolinux: Loading spec packet failed, trying
to wing it...
isolinux: Extremely broken BIOS detected, last ditch attempt with drive = 9F
isolinux: Disk error 01, AX = 4209, drive 9F
Boot failed: press a key to retry...
Helix 1.5
---------
ISOLINUX 2.04 (Debian, 2003-06-06) isolinux: Loading spec packet
failed, trying to wing it...
isolinux: Extremely broken BIOS detected, last ditch attempt with drive = 9F
isolinux: Disk error 01, AX = 42BD, drive 9F
Boot failed: press a key to retry...
Fedora Core 3
-------------
ISOLINUX 2.11 2004-08-16 isolinux: isolinux: Loading spec packet
failed, trying to wing it...
isolinux: Extremely broken BIOS detected, last ditch attempt with drive = 9F
isolinux: Disk error 01, AX = 426F, drive 9F
Boot failed: press a key to retry...
Knoppix 3.6
-----------
ISOLINUX 2.04 (Debian, 2003-06-06) isolinux: isolinux: Loading spec
packet failed, trying to wing it...
isolinux: Extremely broken BIOS detected, last ditch attempt with drive = 9F
isolinux: Disk error 01, AX = 4231, drive 9F
Boot failed: press a key to retry...
SuSE 9.1 Personal
-----------------
ISOLINUX 2.08 0x4072248c isolinux: Disk error 01, AX = 4240, drive 9F
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I've been told to make boot floppies as workaround which defeats the purpose of having bootable CD-ROM images from the various LINUX distributions that have issues with ISOLINUX. This issue wouldn't be resolved if I have a new system that has a card reader for the various memory cards and just a CD-ROM with hard disks on the onboard controllers.
I've also been told to update ths sytem or motherboard BIOS which is slightly crazy since the hardware is obviously working. The jury is still out for a resolution from SYSLINUX, so before you go updating your BIOS, try the floppy boot disk option with both a FreeDOS and LINUX boot disk.
There are some neat BIOS utilities at this site if you wish to investigate the motherboard as the problem further:
http://www.esupport.com/techsupport/...awardutils.htm