Why won't Puppy boot from my USB flash drive?

[zampanoo]

Hello from a total puppy and linux newbie,

when installing Puppy on a USB stick, I am being told that Puppy needs a
drive for itself - and indeed if I keep other stuff next to the Puppy files,
no way of booting from the usb drive.

Thus, do I need to partition my 1GB USB drive if I want to have puppy
on it AND continue to use it as a convenient data transfer tool between windows computers?

Any help appreciated.

Thanks....................Zampanoo......................

[Flash]

I've never run Puppy from a flash drive so this is just a guess and it may well be wrong. I think that the files on your flash drive will still be accessible to Windows computers after you install Puppy on the drive because of the way most flash drives are formatted. The Puppy installation will be seen in Windows as nothing more than several files on the flash drive. You will certainly be able to copy files from the flash drive, and I think you will be able to write files to the drive, from Windows without messing up Puppy or the drive.

[zampanoo]

Flash,

thanks for your reply.

The problem is I don't get Puppy to boot from the USB
stick in the first place. I wonder whether Puppy get lost
because I have other files on the drive.

I have no problems to see the Puppy files and the other
ones through Windows, that's correct.

Bye.............................Zampanoo..............

[Sit Heel Speak]

zampanoo:

Go read the thread "Need help installing pup on old IBM laptop" and the sticky post at the top of the Hardware section concerning booting from USB. Perhaps the information you seek is there.

I'm fairly new at Linux too, and find that I can boot both Puppy 1.0.8 and Puppy 2 alpha 0.0.3 from a USB key, provided it's in my laptop's USB 1.1 port, but not if it's in a 2-port USB 2.0 Cardbus card plugged into the laptop's PCMCIA slot. It is faster to boot from hard disk than through a USB 1.1 port. I am lobbying the experts to make booting through USB 2.0 work over a PCMCIA Cardbus adapter...

I can boot either 1.0.8 or 2 alpha 0.0.3 from a USB key using the grub.exe loader. I can boot 1.0.8 using the WakeUSB floppy, but not the 2 alpha.

Welcome to the rapidly-evolving world of Puppy Linux.
***
Dogbert's technical support***How may I disconnect you?

[BlackAdder]

Sit Heel Speak - Sorry if this is off topic, but you might like to visit this thread where the subject of USB speed was explored.
Now you can get back to the main topic of conversation.

[Sit Heel Speak]

Ah, clues!

MU back then, last October, was thinking along the same lines as I am now, concerning probe order... only, he had much more knowledge then than I have now of where the init scripts are (actually, three weeks ago I didn't know what an init script was).

And now, to vanish for awhile, for a bit of study...