USB boot very slow loading image.gz - [Solved: syslinux]

[PaulR]

Now I have my Puppy USB back but it takes a lot longer than I remember to load image.gz - a full two minutes after loading vmlinuz before the kernel starts uncompressing! Any way to improve things?

Edit: I just noticed Puppy is occupying virtually the whole of the stick - probably why it is slow to load and takes ages to zeroise on exit.

Can I resize Puppy to a sensible size (<100MB) and have it grow as required?

[Flash]

I wish I could be more help, but at least I can tell you that I'm pretty sure your problem has been discussed in the forum before. I don't remember how it was resolved. Try the forum search, and good hunting.

[PaulR]

Thanks Flash - I knew I'd read something about this somewhere and searching the forums I found this....

http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.p ... usb+resize

to which you'd contributed !!

As my Puppy is new I'm going to dump my existing pupxxx file and start over using that thread as a guide to get a sensible size.

[BarryK]

PaulR,
I guess you must have a USB1 interface?

[PaulR]

No Barry it's USB 2 (quite a recent PC this one).

I'm not sure now that the start up delay is due to the size of the pup100 file - certainly it takes ages to zeroise it on shutdown but it takes just as long if not longer to load image.gz on boot (before pup100 comes into play right?)

Experimenting!!

[PaulR]

Right, I deleted pup100 (you did WHAT?!) and edited syslinux to get a new 40mb pup100 instead of 179mb.

On reboot it still took a very long time to load image.gz - far longer than it ever did in the past. I haven't rebooted yet but obviously zeroing the rest of pup100 should be somewhat quicker now.

So, why is it taking about 2 minutes to load a 6MB file.... thinking.

[PaulR]

Solved - When I was having trouble getting Puppy to boot off USB I'd read someplace that it might be an idea to uses syslinux -s x:

Turn out the -s is for safe, slow and stupid! Doing syslinux x: without the -s option has re-invigorated Puppy. Hurray!