VESAMENU.C32 not a COM32R image
Posted: 25 Jul 2015, 02:48
Issue: When booting Porteus, I get a "VESAMENU.C32 not a COM32R image" error and the boot process stalls.
Known workarounds:
(1) Hitting <Tab> to display the various booting options and then choosing one could help proceed with the boot process without solving the problem.
(2) Entering the necessary "Cheat codes" at the "boot:" prompt can help proceed with the boot process without solving the problem.
Diagnosis: The problem is usually caused by a version mismatch of "VESAMENU.C32" that is expected and one that is present.
How to reproduce: The problem can be reproduced by copying the contents of a working Porteus image (from a live memory stick) from a thumbdrive as against the ideal method of copying from installer image or instead of doing a proper installation.
Usually people try to test a distro by running it from a live USB image. Then they copy that image to another location (say a hard disk partition). The copied image works fine from the USB but when copied to another location, unlike the usual documentation says, it doesn't.
The issue is caused by difference in the version of VESAMENU.C32 (or CHAIN.C32 for that matter) used by the distro and the installer (say unetbootin, YUMI and so on).
Solution: Solution lies in copying the correct version of VESAMENU.C32 from the ISO image of the distro as distributed by the developer(s).
This "problem" is not Porteus specific. Web has reports of this problem occuring with many other distros. In case of Porteus the bootloader used is syslinux. So if cascading problems occur with other binaries the entire syslinux folder can be copied from the Porteus distribution image and copied to "/boot/syslinux" folder.
NOTES:
(1) I am new here and not sure if this is the right section to post. If not, apologies and could someone move it to the right section or nudge me in the right direction?
(2) This is not really a bug report. I ran into this problem but found out that it wasn't really a Porteus issue. But since I managed to fix the problem, thought this would be a nice solution to share with the rest of the world. Particularly because when I was googling for a solution, I didn't really find any clear solution to the problem.
(3) I have capitalized file names at places for better readability. Linux file names are case sensitive. So use the right capitalization when typing.
(4) The contents of this article are written by me based on knowledge gained from world wide web and my own attempts at fixing the issue. But if any parts of this write-up violate any copyrights please report here. I'll be happy to accredit the original work.
Known workarounds:
(1) Hitting <Tab> to display the various booting options and then choosing one could help proceed with the boot process without solving the problem.
(2) Entering the necessary "Cheat codes" at the "boot:" prompt can help proceed with the boot process without solving the problem.
Diagnosis: The problem is usually caused by a version mismatch of "VESAMENU.C32" that is expected and one that is present.
How to reproduce: The problem can be reproduced by copying the contents of a working Porteus image (from a live memory stick) from a thumbdrive as against the ideal method of copying from installer image or instead of doing a proper installation.
Usually people try to test a distro by running it from a live USB image. Then they copy that image to another location (say a hard disk partition). The copied image works fine from the USB but when copied to another location, unlike the usual documentation says, it doesn't.
The issue is caused by difference in the version of VESAMENU.C32 (or CHAIN.C32 for that matter) used by the distro and the installer (say unetbootin, YUMI and so on).
Solution: Solution lies in copying the correct version of VESAMENU.C32 from the ISO image of the distro as distributed by the developer(s).
This "problem" is not Porteus specific. Web has reports of this problem occuring with many other distros. In case of Porteus the bootloader used is syslinux. So if cascading problems occur with other binaries the entire syslinux folder can be copied from the Porteus distribution image and copied to "/boot/syslinux" folder.
NOTES:
(1) I am new here and not sure if this is the right section to post. If not, apologies and could someone move it to the right section or nudge me in the right direction?
(2) This is not really a bug report. I ran into this problem but found out that it wasn't really a Porteus issue. But since I managed to fix the problem, thought this would be a nice solution to share with the rest of the world. Particularly because when I was googling for a solution, I didn't really find any clear solution to the problem.
(3) I have capitalized file names at places for better readability. Linux file names are case sensitive. So use the right capitalization when typing.
(4) The contents of this article are written by me based on knowledge gained from world wide web and my own attempts at fixing the issue. But if any parts of this write-up violate any copyrights please report here. I'll be happy to accredit the original work.