I'm building a bootable Gentoo Linux disk, using isolinux. (It's actually a customised sysrescuecd but I don't think the details of that utility are relevant to my problem).
I wish to customise isolinux.cfg to include various site-specific things, but every time I do so I get the dreaded "ERROR: no configuration file found" ... "No DEFAULT or UI configuration directive found!".
Vanilla Sysrescuecd boots with ISOLINUX, and has an isolinux.cfg file (which works fine, of course). I can rebuild the squashfs file on the CD, leaving isolinux.cfg unchanged, and burn a disk that works fine, but as soon as I make the slightest change to isolinux.cfg then the CD refuses to boot.
I checked that the file hadn't accidentally moved to or from DOS format - no; it's the same length. I used "sed" to make my change, rather than an editor, just in case editor droppings were causing this, but no. I've copied the two isolinux.cfg files to another machine for analysis: they're called "works.cfg" and "fails.cfg"; here's the comparison:
ls -l *.cfg
-rw-r--r-- 1 henry henry 12331 Feb 18 19:24 fails.cfg
-rw-r--r-- 1 henry henry 12331 Feb 18 20:43 works.cfg
The only thing I changed from the as-downloaded isolinux.cfg was trivial: the timeout value, and it gives the "No configuration file found" error.
diff works.cfg fails.cfg
10c10
< TIMEOUT 900
---
> TIMEOUT 100
I'm going hairless trying to diagnose this; can someone help?
(I can post the configuration file if someone wants to look at it, but I'm not convinced that its contents are germane)
