Trying to dual boot Puppy & Freedos from same live CD

[ljones]

Ok, apologies if this is in the wrong place. But I'm having a problem booting puppy linux. The reason is that I guess I am trying to do something very unusual here -- I'm trying to make a CD which will have both freedos *and* puppy linux.

Since I have no idea on how to make a multiboot cd (note: a cd, not on hard drive) this idea came to me -- to add the freedos files to the CD along with the puppy files. Then boot with a freedos bootdisk image (which works ok, I can get to the cd-rom ok), from there I can use freedos or load up linux.

To boot linux from freedos, I tried loadlin, but it didn't work at all, but then I stumbled across in the puppy linux wiki a program called "linld". Following the instructions on the puppy linux wiki I came up with the following;

A:\> linld image=D:\vmlinuz initrd=D:\image.gz cl=@test1

where test1 contains the line "root=/dev/ram0" .

This works - but up to a point (I can't see if there are any errors occuring while puppy boots up since the text zips up the screen so quickly!). I Get to the stage where it's time to choose the keyboard which appears to work, then puppy linux tries to start, appears to switch to a video mode, but the screen stays completely empty (black) and nothing happens, no CD activity, nothing it just stops dead.

Does anyone know why puppy would just suddenly "stop"?

Thanks,
ljones

[brad_chuck]

I do not know how to fix your problem but this site may help you

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

[raffy]

You're at the X stage so please search for some display-related problems in this forum. You may have to check your video hardware.

(I assume of course that you followed the linld guide well: see this to check

http://www.ph-islands.net/pupinstall/winxp.php#comments )

[miamuy]

have you tried "tiny.exe" ?

lnload won't run properly in fDOS (in my set-up) but runs ok in MS-DOS. i haven't figured out why because something else works.

[theelf]

http://www.xs4all.nl/~lennartb/bootloaders/node8.html
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual ... D-ROM.html

[ljones]

Thanks for the links and stuff there, but I almost have it working with linld. I've not really tried grub yet, but tiny.exe didn't work crashing with an error message (which I think was something like 0x200 or 0x220); I tried loadlin once more, but it died complaining with an "out of data" error message.

It almost worked with linld and freedos. I tried it very briefly tonight under qemu (both qemu and booting for real do the same thing on my system). I found if I stopped puppy booting up just before the keyboard setup program and ran startx manually, I was able to load puppy!

**EDIT I now have it working ... well, sort of! Puppy can't find anywhere to save "personal" files, but it now *does* boot with linld and freedos. Oddly, freedos' ctmouse program seemed to be the problem. REMing this out in the autoexec.bat seems to make booting puppy from freedos possible .

ljones[/b]

[Lobster]

I've not really tried grub yet

I would have thought that is worth trying. There is also a version of Puppy that boots from Windows, not sure where that link is. Grub is a developed preloader allowing you to run multiple OS. However if you have found another way of doing things let us know.

Now that we have Wine for Puppy. Do we have Dos?
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/links/