Floopy boot USB flash pen

Booting, installing, newbie
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biglaus@optusnet.com.au

Floopy boot USB flash pen

#1 Post by biglaus@optusnet.com.au »

G'day Barry.

John Doe
Posts: 1681
Joined: Mon 01 Aug 2005, 04:46
Location: Michigan, US

#2 Post by John Doe »

I'm not Barry, but peace be with you too. I have a bit of experience booting puppy from usb flash ram device and will try to help.

How big is the ram device?

How much ram do yo have on the motherboard?

What do your load params look like?

How are you loading puppy (Grub, Tiny.exe, LinLD.com)?

If grub, are you using Ms-DOS or another DOS?

~John Doe

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babbs
Posts: 397
Joined: Tue 10 May 2005, 06:35
Location: Tijuana, BCN, Mexico

#3 Post by babbs »

Another question to add to John Doe's list of questions... What version of Puppy are you trying to use? (In helping someone in my local LUG, I found out she was trying to use her thumb drive as a boot disk with Puppy v1.0.0; there some issues with some USB drives, and Puppy v1.0.4 has an updated syslinux.)

Also, be sure you have the USB drive formatted Fat16 (not Fat32).

Guest

#4 Post by Guest »

OK, I've got the latest release of Puppy. My computer has 1g of ram, my flash drive is 256mb. My computer (and most others I might be fiddling with) does not boot from USB, so I am using the boot disk with tiny.exe on it. The floppy works fine, locates the files on the flash drive, loads into ram and linux starts to boot up. Goes through most of it's pre boot checks etc. Then the error notices come one after the other 'cp full etc...' and the boot up fails. I have it working fine from cdrom and most computers will have a cdrom device. Just thought it would be nice to have it on a flash drive as well. Nice to have in the toolbox. Other details of the computer.. 1800+ AMD Athalon, 2x40g hard drives, DVD rom and CD burner, USB hub with 4 ports. Netgear wireless router/firewall serves internet to 3 other computers and a voip device. Perhaps it is not making a big enough ram drive?

Guest

#5 Post by Guest »

Addendum... I am not sure what the flash card is formated with, could be fat 32. I just used it as is. Will make it fat16 and see how it goes then, thanks for the tip.

Guest

#6 Post by Guest »

OK, I formatted the flash drive as fat 16 and coppied the necessary files to it. Now Puppy can't mount the drive and tiny can't find it either??? Was formatted with VFat I noticed. Not a big deal since I have the cd. Just annoys me to not be able to do something I should be able to do.

John Doe
Posts: 1681
Joined: Mon 01 Aug 2005, 04:46
Location: Michigan, US

#7 Post by John Doe »

Sounds like you are right about where I was when I first got here. I was using puppy 1.0.4, tiny.exe (included with boot2pup) and a 256meg usb drive.

Check out this post and see if it helps:
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=1391

ALSO (this is important), make sure you aren't passing the default puppy size with:
PFILE=pup100-none-262144

That is too big for a 256meg device. I cut it in half to get it to work in the end.
PFILE=pup100-none-131072

I also built a a boot floppy that is a combination of boot2pup and wakepup, but uses LINLD.COM instead. It also has some other DOS tools and additions. I'm trying to fine tune it right now. I can't get sysinternals NTFSDOS to work under FreeDOS. I wanted to finish that up first, but I'll post up an image for you if you need.

Let us know how it goes.

Guest

#8 Post by Guest »

Thanks John, I'll play with it for a while...

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