Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Mr Doolie · Joined: 28 Jun 2005 Posts: 143

Greets,

Do or die I'm going to get Puppy booting off my external USB drive.
Here's what I *think* I can do. Please remember I'm a Linux Noobie and Dummy(TM).

1) Format the drive as FAT32.
2) Copy all the puppy files from the CD.
3) Run a magic bootmaker thingie that makes the drive boot up like the CD would have. IE: I end up with a Live Puppy HDD (or a Live Puppy Thumbdrive even).

How do I do step 3?
Can this be done on a USB thumbdrive too? Make the thing bootable without needing a floppy to transfer control to the external device?

papaschtroumpf · Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 250

what you want for 3) is called syslinux
look at the instructions forthe thumb drive, it should work the same as a usb drive.

Mr Doolie · Joined: 28 Jun 2005 Posts: 143

Been there. Done that.

When I boot it the BIOS screen says "LI" on the bottom
and locks up.

papaschtroumpf · Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 250

did you try the built in wizard? worked for me except that the version of syslinux it used was too old. There are also reports of people having success by going to an older version of syslinux

Mr Doolie - that's me · Guest

Yes, the wizard was the first thing I tried. It reports the external as "SDC" and also says it's unmountable.

danleff · Joined: 08 May 2005 Posts: 294 Location: Albany, NY

If I remember correctly, syslinux needs a fat16 filesystem, not fat32.

From the Syslinux page;

nameless foo · Guest

Did you set the boot flag?

Mr Doolie · Joined: 28 Jun 2005 Posts: 143

Danlef:

Will Fat16 work on a 4Gig drive? I thought the limit on F16 was 2Gigs,
----------------------------------------------------------
nameless foo:

"set the boot flag"......what's that in English <grin>? Linux Noobie here.
I'd have to say no since I don't know what that is.

Let's try it this way please. The puppy wizard sees the drive as sdc but won't mount it. Guess I'll have to do this with Microcrap fdisk. I fdisk the drive and format it. Copy the pup files to it. Run syslinux on it. It starts to boot, says "LI" and locks up.

What step(s) did I miss?

Thanks

Flash · Posted: Mon 04 Jul 2005, 12:54 Post subject:

When you formatted the (external, USB Hard Drive?) with fdisk, from the Windows CD, did you choose FAT16 or FAT32?

Ian · Posted: Mon 04 Jul 2005, 15:38 Post subject:

If at boot it says ' LI ' and then stops that may indicate that you have LILO installed as your bootloader and it is not functioning correctly.

Is this left over from a previous install of Linux.

papaschtroumpf · Joined: 17 Jun 2005 Posts: 250

FYI, on my main machine which has a DFI NF2 Ultra motherboard, I can't boot from flash even though it boots fine in other computers. All I get is a "no operating system found".

I agree with the previous poster though getting stuck at "LI" would seem to point to LILO