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Installing arch to old HP Desktop (HPE-341f, AMD) with a small SSD for system and some other drives. I have installed syslinux and followed instructions at https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/syslinux.

The boot menu comes up nicely.When I select the boot option the system reboots.

I am confident of the process up to the point of installing the boot manager. I have always used systemd-boot but this machine is an old BIOS piece so I can't use EFI.

So at the point of installing and configuring the bootloader I do this:

arch-chroot /mnt
...

#pacman -S syslinux
#cp /usr/lib/syslinux/bios/*.c32 /boot/syslinux/
#extlinux --install /boot/syslinux
#dd bs=440 count=1 conv=notrunc if=/usr/lib/syslinux/bios/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdc


ls /boot/syslinux/*.c32 | wc -l


 60

Partitioning. I understand that msdos type is mbr without any modification so...

**fdisk -l /dev/sdc**
    Disk /dev/sdc: 223.57 GiB, 240057409536 bytes, 468862128 sectors
    Disk model: KINGSTON SA400S3
    Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
    Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
    Disklabel type: dos
    Disk identifier: 0x712df4f8

Device     Boot   Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sdc1  *       2048   1050623   1048576   512M 83 Linux
/dev/sdc2       1050624 468862127 467811504 223.1G 83 Linux

syslinux.cfg in /boot/syslinux I am using the UUID of /dev/sdc2 (boot is on /dev/sdc1)

**syslinux.cfg**

UI menu.c32
PROMPT 0        # Set to 1 if you always want to display the boot: prompt
MENU TITLE Boot Menu
TIMEOUT 50
DEFAULT arch

LABEL arch
    LINUX ../vmlinuz-linux
    APPEND root=UUID="17a9c599-b562-4dba-bda4-22b9ef81a60e" rw
    INITRD ../initramfs-linux.img

LABEL fallback
    MENU LABEL Fallback
    LINUX ../vmlinuz-linux
    APPEND root=/dev/sdc2 rw
    INITRD ../initramfs-linux-fallback.img
Stephen Boston
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1 Answers1

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If your system is stuck in a reboot loop, your boot is likely failing. Without additional information into the kernel error, you won't be able to troubleshoot. If you add the following line to the end of your syslinux.cfg file, the Linux Kernel should describe the error or panic code that causes the reboot.

# boots after 10 seconds.
TOTALTIMEOUT 100
Robert Jamison
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