Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Snail · Joined: 18 Oct 2009 Posts: 22

I would like to be able to boot Puppy from the internal SD card reader of my laptop. I do this with my Asus EEE 4G notebook and it is great to be able to have a a removable, bootable media that I can plug in and basically forget. Using a USB stick for the same job is not as good because, as long as the stick is plugged in, there is a risk of knocking the drive and damaging the stick and the computer.

Unfortunately, many laptops, including my Compaq Presario C793, do not have BIOS support for booting from the internal card reader. I have searched this forum and have been unable to find sufficiently complete information on how to overcome this problem. However, my Googling indicates that a work-around should be possible. I need some support from this forum to do it, if it is in fact possible.

Once Puppy is loaded, from a USB or hard-drive install, the SD drive is fully accessible. PMOUNT sees it under the "usbdrv" tag as "Generic-Multi_Card" "sdb1". The problem is that the kernel cannot see the drive at boot time, only after Puppy is fully loaded are the drivers for the card available.

Although a total direct boot from SD can't be done without BIOS support, it is apparently possible to boot, via GRUB mounted on a BIOS supported device, e.g. the hard drive. The trick is, apparently, to add an entry for the SD installed OS to menu.lst on the hard drive. The initrd line in this entry must point to a specially modified copy of initrd.gz, also on the hard drive. The modified initrd.gz needs to have the SD and MMC drivers included, so that the kernal can see the SD card and access the copy of Puppy on the card at boot.

The instructions for creating the modified initrd I have found on the web do not work for Puppy, because Puppy doesn't have the mkinitrd or initramfs-tools helper scripts they use. Instead I need to edit initrd.gz directly. There are several pages on this forum showing how to open initrd.gz for editing. I have done that. It seems reasonably straightforward to copy the driver modules into initrd. However, it is also necessary to edit the init script file to instruct the kernal to load these drivers. This is beyond me at present.

Can anyone please help?

What I am trying to do seems sufficiently generally useful that I was a bit surprised not to find a howto here. Or even an option in the universal installer. Have I missed something or is it a much harder task than it seems?

Snail · Joined: 18 Oct 2009 Posts: 22

What, 90 views and no help yet? Well I kept on trying and now I have a working SD install. However, I am not sure why the GRUB setup I have works at all, so this may not work for everybody.

From an existing, bootable install of Puppy 430, I installed 430 to an SD card, using the universal installer. (Note, I did this from an Asus EEE 4G, using Puppy 430 on a USB stick as the bootable medium and the internal card reader. The EEE does have BIOS support for booting from SD. I am not sure that BIOS support is really necessary for this stage, I have yet to test it. It does make it easy to check that the SD install is good.)

I followed Pizzasgood's instructions on how to unpack a copy of initrd.gz into a sub-directory called initrd-tree.

kayan · Joined: 14 Feb 2008 Posts: 64 Location: India

I am a newbee ,but i wanted to boot from sd ram or from usb ,but my laptop does not support usb booting ...i wish you all the best ,so that people like me can use your initrd .gz to boot puppy
thanks for trying Very Happy

jemimah · Posted: Tue 10 Nov 2009, 12:47 Post_subject:

This will not help people who can't boot at all from usb, but if your goal is simply to be able to remove the USB stick drive so it doesn't get snagged on stuff, you can try my Ramboot script. It will load everything to RAM, so you can remove the drive. Then if you put the drive back during shutdown, it will put your save file back on the drive.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=48465

disciple · Posted: Tue 10 Nov 2009, 16:16 Post_subject:

If you can't boot from USB you can always use a wakepup floppy disk. But you're better off to boot from the hard drive.

Snail · Joined: 18 Oct 2009 Posts: 22

Hi Kayan,

I don't know how much computer expertise you have, so please excuse me if the first bit seems too basic. I assume that you have already tried to select the USB media as the first boot option in your BIOS setup? If you have tried that and confirmed that that is not possible, it may be possible to download a more up to date BIOS from the laptop manufacturer and flash the BIOS to make USB booting work. (Never flashed one myself however, it seems a bit scary to try something that could "Brick" the system.) If you can't make the either the USB or the SD boot the "proper" way, then either my trick or, as Disciple points out, an install to the internal drive are options. Or you could boot from the CD or floppy, if your laptop has them.

What my trick actually does is allow you to run Puppy that is loaded onto an un-bootable sd card. You are actually booting from your internal hard drive. To access the Puppy on the sd card, you therefore have to have to load GRUB, my initrd and the kernel(the vmlinuz file) on the internal drive. These are all really small files compared to even a small Puppy system, so if you don't want to make space for the main Puppy files on the internal drive, or if you want to use same Puppy setup on other computers this is useful. So really its a sort of pseudo-SD-boot, or a combined un-bootable_SD/bootable-media trick.

Nothing I did seems to require a USB at all. However, you obviously have to be able to boot Puppy somewhere to install onto the SD and to make the initrd. You also need to be able to install GRUB or some other multi-bootloader to your hard drive.

Presumably if the USB is not bootable, you have another way of booting, like a CD drive, or maybe even a floppy, as Disciple suggested? You only need that alternative boot media during the setup stages. Or you could try doing the set-up work on another machine and then copying the files to the laptop.

Incidentally, you could use my approach to allow a pseudo_USB boot on your system. In that case, you wouldn't have to make a special initrd at all, just copy the normal one to your hard drive along with the kernel and setup GRUB as described. If that was done, I'd be inclined to use Jemima's clever script as well.

As I noted above, I have not tested doing the actual initial install on the SD card using a non-bootable card-reader. I read somewhere that that wasn't possible, but I can't see why. Make sure that the SD card partition has the bootable flag set though.

disciple · Posted: Thu 12 Nov 2009, 06:10 Post_subject:

Of course if you're computer doesn't normally support USB booting it probably means it is old and it would be painfully slow to boot from USB anyway... why don't you want to boot from CD or hard drive?

ICPUG · Joined: 24 Jul 2005 Posts: 596 Location: UK

Snail

I am pretty dumb regarding this but it looks interesting.

The key to getting your SD card to boot seems to be modifying the initrd.gz by
(a) copying the mmc directory
(b) adding those lines in init

Do you happen to know the equivalent steps for getting a usb stick, rather than an SD card to boot?

Snail · Joined: 18 Oct 2009 Posts: 22

ICPUG

As I noted in my last post, using the same process as for the SD should work. The difference is that there is no need to produce a modified initrd.gz. This is because the standard one already contains and loads the USB modules. So you would just need to copy it. NOTE, I think that works, haven't actually tested it.

Disciple, there are a few reasons to do this. If you set up the USB in the normal way, you can cart it around much more conveniently than a CD and it will run on any modern PC. This trick essentially just modifies the old PC to be able to behave more like a modern one. I agree however that it may well be very slow to boot and save on a USB 1.0 port. I have read that older SD card setups are even slower but I don't know the specifics. On the other hand, provided the system has more than 256Meg of RAM, it should actually run OK once loaded, since Puppy itself runs entirely in RAM. There are ways to force the Pupsave into ram as well, and you can turn off the automatic Pupsave backup during sessions if you want.

disciple · Posted: Fri 13 Nov 2009, 02:33 Post_subject:

mcewanw

mcewanw · Posted: Fri 13 Nov 2009, 08:04 Post_subject:

I have since tried without waitusb=10 and my old Dell CPx laptop (with no USB Bios support) still booted fine with the pup431.sfs on the USB stick as described above. It actually wasn't too slow on the second boot (after the pupsave file had been created (probably because the RAM is only 256 MB on my system, so I suspect not much gets copied into RAM at boot time).

One good thing about running from the USB stick is that I should be able to let the harddrive spin down (less noise and power usage).

ICPUG · Joined: 24 Jul 2005 Posts: 596 Location: UK

mcewanw

Thanks for running the test and posting the successful result of booting a non bios bootable USB based Puppy.

I am going to keep a reference of this thread as I am sure this question will be asked again!

Snail · Joined: 18 Oct 2009 Posts: 22

Yes, it seems that the pmedia parameter is the answer to how the correct distro and save files are found. In the unlikely event that you wanted to attach several usb sticks at the same time, each with their own Puppy, you would need to get a bit clever with psubdir or the likes in order to distinguish between them. Note cards in card readers seem to be detected as usb as well, so duplication is not that impossible if you tend to just leave a puppy in the reader, as I do. I'll leave working that out "as an exercise for the reader".

So I will change the title to this thread to "SOLVED"

Snail · Joined: 18 Oct 2009 Posts: 22

mcewanw,

A bit off topic - You are obviously a lot more knowledgeable about the puppy parameters than I am. Do you know if there is a good page that covers them in detail? I have searched around this forum and can't find anything definitive. Also, it's a minor point, but somewhere I saw some comments that "ram0" isn't needed on later versions of Puppy. Is that right?