Puppy CD won't boot on Thinkpad 770; wants floppy?.

[Guest (Durban - SA)]

I am trying to get puppy to boot on a Thinkpad 770, it has a Pentium MMX processor, and 64mb ram, however when I put the live CD in the drive and boot up, nothing happens, it gives me a strange screen with a picture of the floppy drive and arrows demonstrating inserting the floppy, I just presume this is the system trying to tell me to insert a boot disk as it is not finding a bootable device.
However when I start up with the DSL live disk inserted, it boots up perfectly and goes to the X window.
I have tried using the solution from the website where you create a boot floppy and use that to start it up but this also does not work. I have also tried setting puppy up on a 512 mb memory stick and booting from the memory stick but the same thing happens. I have tried both Live CD and usb memory with the boot floppy inserted and all this does is show me Free Dos on the screen and hangs without giving any other error messages.
Any help will be appreciated.

P.S. This laptop does not currently have a hard drive although I am looking at trying to get this situation resolved but I would still like to get Puppy to boot and maybe use the USB Memory to store my data, etc.

[psy-fi]

Did you mediacheck the CD to make sure it burned right? It may have burned incorrectly.

[Guest (Durban - SA)]

I did check the MD5 Sum and it was correct, if this is what you are reffering to, I am still ralatively new to Linux.
I also tried burning the CD again just in case I had done something wrong previously, I also double checked that I was burning a bootable CD-Rom. After having done all this, still experiencing the same problems.
I am going to try re-doing the boot floppy on another floppy disk as floppies can sometimes be quite unreliable. Hope this will help, don't know if I'm on the right path, just trying whatever comes to mind.
Any other ideas that I may not have thought of will be much appreciated, also if you meant something else by "checking the Media", please let me know how to go about doing it. Thanks.

[Guest]

I've only been using Puppy for about a week, so this may be an ignorant answer, but it could be that when Puppy tries to mount hda1 (to look for an existing pup001), the Thinkpad hardware gives up since you don't have a HDD onboard.

If you can't quickly get a hard drive to test this theory, run the LiveCD with option 4 (or 5 if using the multisession CD). Puppy will not look for pup001 on the hard drive partition, and should bypass your problem.

Hope my $.02 helps.

[psy-fi]

no, the md5 sum was what i wa talking about. i'm not sure why your live cd won't boot when you can obviously boot from another live cd...

maybe a dumb question, but you didn't by chance just put the .iso file by itself on a CD, did you?

see if the cd will boot in another computer, if so, that will help narrow down the problem.

[kethd]

We can't help you until we know for sure that your CD is OK. The only way to know that is to try it on other computers. If it works on any computer, we know that is probably not the problem. If it never works anywhere, then the CD is the problem.

Sadly, you have to be very careful trying the CD on other computers -- do not let it default boot! Choose boot menu 3, then just hit ENTER later...

(Not having a hard drive in the laptop should not be a problem.)