trying to use Toshiba Satellite laptop without hd

[renatogui]

A good friend was going to throw away a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a damaged HD that would cost almost the same as another full laptop.
I am trying to make the computer usable again. It has bootable floppy and dvd-rom, 3 non bootable usb ports and 256MB RAM.

My friend has a local network and wouid like to
1. connect to other local machines
2. edit some Word and Excell files saving to pendrive or other network computers.
3. see photos taken with an old Sony digital camera (floppy memory)

I would like to use puppy NOP410 r1, with pfix=ram and goffice.

I began installing a NOP in ram from CD and creating a pendrive installation using Universal Installer. I had to remove the damaged HD in order to stop the never ending loop searching for puppy files in the present but inacessible HD. The bios was able to detect there was no disk in the system.

Then I spent 3 days trying to boot from a 2GB Kingston pendrive using wakepup2 in a floppy without success. I could manage to boot into pendrive but always got the message about not finding pup_410.sfs. Wakepup2 creator says it is a kernel fault. I did not find a solution in this forum so I changed my mind.

Now I am trying to prepare a bootable CD completely customized in advance.
I can make a CD using the universal installer and put a goffice.sfs inside it in order to have the edition software ready. But when I try to configure aplication startup in Boot Manager configure bootup I get the error: must shutdown and create a personal save first.

Is there a way to force the finding of Pup_410.sfs in the pendrive using wakepup2?
Can I start a sfs file inside a bootable CD somehow without having to make a big remastered CD including the corresponding program installed via pet?
I would be very glad to have a complete working solution for my friend with no needed manual configuration.

By the way, puppy does not have brazilian localisation (or localization?) and do not show ABNT2 keyboard layout (oficial brazilian keyboard). Today Brazil is a huge internet client. About 70% of the keyboards here are abnt2 and the remaining are old keyboards or inported (from USA) new laptops using us-international with dead-keys. I dont know where Barry found br-latin1-br and old 2-letter br keyboards. They do not work with our known keyboards.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Renato

[tw296]

I have a Toshiba satellite too - an S1800. I found it simply refused to boot at all without the drive. So can't really help you much.

[renatogui]

tw296,

I thought my Toshiba would not boot either. Try pressing ESC and waiting (a long time) for the message to press F1. If you press it, you will enter the setup.
Choose another boot order(using space bar), begining with FDC or CD-ROM (here this is in the first page, bottom, right). Save the setings using End + Y ( you will save also the inexistence of HD). Next boot will be quicker.

[orion]

do you know if it's possible to stop the hdd search within the boot sequence?? my hdd is fine, but encrypted so puppy can't read it.

i just want to be able to boot around it.

[renatogui]

orion,

I don't know how to convince puppy that there is no HD available.
In my case, I tried to disable the hd in bios setup but this option was not available. You can try this in your computer first.

When I removed the HD, I think the BIOS tried to connect for a while and then gave up accepting that there is nothing there and acting according to this fact.

I think this is not the puppy case. If the computer already knows there is no HD, Puppy only search for files in really installed memory devices. But if the HD is damaged (or encripted) but it is there, There is no time counter to avoid the never ending search.

If I where you I would try to use pfix=ram to run puppy for the first time and choosing not to save your data in the end of the session. I think this way puppy will not try to find any data files in your hd.