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
