Well, being that everyday My 2 kingston data travelers get
severely punished, deleted, re-formatted, ddd'd, multiple installs, etc

going on what like 9mos now?
Not a burp from either one

well, the other day i was playing with both Pmagic live and the new sidux-2009-xfce on my usb's

Usually I use my ext3/grub 4gb usb and just run the distro's as frugal

my other usb, it's fat32/syslinux, I use that to make sure the distro's boot the same, etc from both fs types
you know, cause in my downloads I set you up for both

Anyway, I had mentioned somewhere on this forum before about how
Syslinux can't recognize/boot any file(kernel/initrd) with a name of more than 8 letters and 3 letter file extension names (tgz,)

So, if using an older version of syslinux, when you try to boot
"microcore.gz" or pmagic's "initramfs", your gonna get an error
saying "can't find image: initramfs"
what?!

well, it seems every distro ships a differing version of syslinux??

My Ubuntu-9.04 ships version 3.63
what?
yep, can't recognize 8letters+ filename

Fedora 11?
Fedora 11 uses 3.73 I believe or higher
fedora's syslinux can boot long files names

Tinycore 2.2rc2?
good to go, version 3.7+

So, what's Ubuntu's problem?

from the pmagic forum
http://partedmagic.com/forum.html

so, the moral of this tale?
get the latest version of syslinux

ALSO, the syslinux wiki used to relay this info
openly, but they have hidden it somewhere?
http://partedmagic.com/forum.html

get syslinux here
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/

well, this is bad
I tried installing newest syslinux
in my ultimate edition box and something went wrong??

anyway
I also found out Unetbootin also uses like version 3.63
which is bad

so, the moral of the story
is use Fedora 11 or tinycore to install syslinux
to usb

to find out if you have an old version-
either boot up your usb and it will say which version at top of screen before booting

or

rename the kernel or initrd in your usb
say your booting tinycore
change the kernel name from "bzImage"
to "bzImage09"

and see if it boots
if it says "can't find kernel bzImage09"
or similar
then you've got an old version

UPDATE UPDATE

BAD news
BAD news

Seems the isolinux that comes with Ubuntu-9.04
is a bad brew or something?

I cut a couple cd's,
and at boot time I get errors like "if=0"
and other stuff??

To make sure I burned the same iso on Ubuntu 8.04
and it worked flawlessly

So, old syslinux and bad isolinux

anybody know WHY?