Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[klager]

I have problems too boot Puppy from CD on a laptop with a broken hard drive. The problem is that the hard drive is broken, but still found by the system. When I try too boot Puppy it searches for Puppy files on the disks and it never stops trying to access the broken hard drive. How can I make Puppy not searching for files on the broken hard drive? I have tried to just remove the hard drive, but with out the hard drive it cant boot at all from the CD.

[Bruce B]

Yup, Linux is pretty good about finding those hard drives, especially on the first channel.

You could try some boot parameters, I certainly can't say for sure they will work in your case.

puppy hdX=noprobe ide=nodma

where X is the letter of the drive not to probe, add more if you want.

< 4.10 used /dev/hdX

4.10 uses /dev/sdX

[Flash]

You can pause the boot process with the up arrow, to give you time to enter the boot parameters Bruce mentioned. When you get them entered, hit Enter to continue booting.

[ezeze5000]

You could try disabling the hard drive in the BIOS.
That way it wont even find the broken drive, and the motherboard wont be upset ether.

I hope this helps.

[Bruce B]

[ac2011]

Apologies for resurrecting a dead thread, but it still turns up in search results so this may help someone, and 'noprobe' didn't work for me.

I had a similar problem, but on an Asus Eee PC with a soldered-in SSD drive that was broken, so no way of removing it. Running Puppeee 1.0 would hang for 3-5 minutes on every boot.

First, tell the initrd.gz scripts to ignore the drive, and second tell the main boot-up script to ignore it.

So, the first. From the command line, need to gain access to the contents of the initial ramdrive, which is usually initrd.gz:

[this part is from another thread on here]

Perform commands starting in directory containing initrd.gz

To extract:

mkdir initdir
cd initdir
zcat ../initrd.gz | cpio -i -d

To compress:

cd initdir
find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip -9 > ../initrd.gz

In between those two operations, you need to edit the appropriate file(s). For Puppeee 1.0 (using eee-504.sfs), need to edit /sbin/probepart.init and add the following *after* the two variables have already been defined:

# All I've actually done to the PARTITIONS line is add "| sda" to the list of excluded (grepped out) partition names.
# Dodgy drive is sda, boot drive is usually sdb, so change as appropriate here
PARTITIONS="`grep -E '^ .*[^k][0-9]$' /proc/partitions | tr -s ' ' | cut -f 4-5 -d ' ' | grep -vE ' loop| ram| sda' | tr ' ' '|'`"
ALLDRVS="sdb "

Then recompress the initrd.gz file and that should be the first step done (try it; it should get further before hanging).

Next step, possibly a little more straightforward. Boot the system and then load /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit into a text editor. Find where its hanging next (for Puppeee it was after the 'Loading kernel modules' message appeared, so I searched for that). The problem is probably something like ATADRIVES=blah so simply comment out that line (in case it actually accesses the drives) and add a line after it saying ATADRIVES="sdb ", then reboot (saving your save file as you do).

Then, in the same file, need to comment out the line that reads something like [ "$SWAPON" != "yes" ] && loadswap_func

because the procedure 'loadswap_func' uses fdisk -l to read the partition table. So you can't have a swap file here (or if you do, need to modify loadswap_func so it doesn't use fdisk).

A slightly neater option is to leave the above line intact, but modify the 'fdisk -l' line in loadswap_func to read 'fdisk -l /dev/sdb' instead (or whichever disk you're using), so you could have a swap file on that drive, but no other.

Close down with a save file (so the script is updated) and it should now work OK.

In summary, what happens is that whenever the OS first tries to access the broken SSD hard drive, it will hang. Whether that's when looking for the Puppy files, finding partitions or setting swap on (which uses fdisk), it'll hang for 3-5 minutes. Making these changes will prevent that, but it will *still* hang (probably) if you use fdisk -l or some similar command once booted. So don't.

[gcmartin]

For about a year, the ability to boot an OS on a PC without the PC's HDD or USB or CD-DVD units has been made available to this community.

Should any ones of us want to do this, simple follow this guide. If you can use your package manager (PPM) the max aount of time to do this is 15 minutes. Every user who has attempted this has found it "really simple". And, you will get help via the forum on that thread should you need it. No CD-DVD/HDD/USB needed at all.

Hope this helps.