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The time now is Tue 21 May 2013, 15:10 All times are UTC - 4 |
 Forum index » House Training » Beginners Help ( Start Here) |
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I borked my menu.lst, now a Puppy CD won't even boot
Moderators: Flash, Ian, JohnMurga |
 
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hribarj
Joined: 06 Apr 2012 Posts: 15 |
I just switched over to Puppy from Mandriva 2009 on an old IBM ThinkPad T22, 256MB, 20GB drive on a LAN. I really love it, but as an old Windoze user am having install problems. I use this laptop like many others to remotely search the web and use VNC to access my primary computer which runs XP and has loads of storage. I was able to download and instrall Puppy to the hard drive of the laptop and had almost everything setup, including WIFI - which I couldn't do in other dists. The only problem I was having was booting up and shutting down. I am booting from the hard drive, from menu.lst. Whenever I tried to boot I ran into a dead end on the first try, but was successful on the second. When I tried to shutdown it would go to a black screen but not turn off the computer. I had to manually power off. I think this might have caused the problem with the subsequent boot. To try to fix this I went into menu.lst and changed a few commands (STUPID). I changed (hd0,1) to (sda0,1) not understanding the way things work. As a result, I can't do anything now. I tried several times booting from the CD live with no success. I have been trying to edit menu.lst from grub, but I don't have a clue how to do it. I did save a copy of the original menu.lst file, but don't know how to access it. I really would appreciate any help you can give me, I just ordered 256MB more RAM to put in this old dinasour, and hope I don't have to eat it. Thanks |
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rcrsn51
 Joined: 05 Sep 2006 Posts: 7748 Location: Stratford, Ontario |
When you boot off the Puppy Live CD, use the boot argument
This will ignore any possibly corrupt files on the hard drive. Then you can do a re-install. |
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jola66
Joined: 06 Apr 2012 Posts: 4 |
Sorry for the simple question, but what is a boot argument & how would i go about doing this? I have puppy 5.3.1 in a think pad r51, sda1 drive, & when i tried to boot -up anew w/ no cd in drive, I got error loading OS, went to BIOS, went through all the boot-up options, no changes. But is does boot from CD What did I do? Muchas gracias, jola66 |
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rcrsn51
Joined: 05 Sep 2006 Posts: 7748 Location: Stratford, Ontario |
When the Puppy CD boots, there is a short initial pause. At that point, type in
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boolean
Joined: 31 Oct 2009 Posts: 21 |
When booting up in grub ,press e on the offending line ,then edit it , then press b to boot |
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bigpup
 Joined: 11 Oct 2009 Posts: 3687 Location: Charleston S.C. USA |
Please start your own topic about your problem. Hard to help two people with different hardware in one topic. Problem may be similar, but hardware is not. You probably need to install a boot loader or modify the one you have. _________________ I have found, in trying to help people, that the things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem. Puppy Help 101 An interactive tutorial for Puppy 5.2.5 |
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bigpup
Joined: 11 Oct 2009 Posts: 3687 Location: Charleston S.C. USA |
hribarj, What version of Puppy are you using? How is it installed? Frugal or full? Is it duel boot with Windows? _________________ I have found, in trying to help people, that the things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem. Puppy Help 101 An interactive tutorial for Puppy 5.2.5 |
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Peterm321
Joined: 29 Jan 2009 Posts: 196 |
It is possible there may be some confusion between kernel device names with grub's device names. Old kernels used to address the primary hard drive as /dev/hda and any partitions on it would be called /dev/hda[nnn] where nnn=the partition number. Later kernels changed to /dev/sda[nnn]. However grub is not the kernel. It expects its own references to hard drives to be in grub format but any parameters passed to the kernel to be in kernel format, see this typical excerpt from menu.1st:
The /dev/sda1 reference in the title means not a lot to grub. ( It is for the human that reads the boot screen). root (hd0,0) tells grub to look for boot code on device 0, partition 1. However grub uses 0 not 1 as its starting point so (hd0,0) in grub language means kernel device /dev/sda1 (partition 1). The kernel parameters in menu.1st can include cheatcodes, if any. Device references passed to the kernel are for kernel interpretation and therefore are in kernel language not grub language. From your post it appears you have a bootable linux partion on partition No. 2 ? grub=(hd0,1) or kernel /dev/sda2 (?) therefore I presume your menu.1st should include an entry something like:
If you have messed up menu.1st I dont see that alone would destroy any data. You have to fix the menu.1st in the /boot/grub/menu.1st file. As per the other comments since you cant boot via HD, you will need to boot a live CD or rescue disk of some kind and make the edits from there. |
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hribarj
Joined: 06 Apr 2012 Posts: 15 |
I am using Puppy 3.1.5 with no Windows present. I partitioned the 20GB hard drive into 1GB Linux swap-file and the rest as ext3. I have reinstalled Puppy several times and now I have everything running. However, the machine will still not power off using the MENU options. I am forced to hold the power button down to completely shut down. This causes some problems when I turn it back on since it thinks it was shut down by power failure or other non normal method. I would like to thank everyone for their replies, but I should make it clear that I am really a Linux infant and didn't grasp a lot of what you said. I could live with the inconvenience, but it sure would be nice to be able to shut off the computer. |
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hribarj
Joined: 06 Apr 2012 Posts: 15 |
Sorry, amend last post. I'm using version 5.3.1. Must be the dislexia setting in. |
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hribarj
Joined: 06 Apr 2012 Posts: 15 |
Forgot to add that I used the FULL install. I did it based on info I read that recommended this if not using Windows on same machine. |
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sfeeley
Joined: 14 Feb 2010 Posts: 807 |
Although there is some debate, the general consensus is not really. A frugal install is usually considered preferable, in nearly every case except extremely underpowered computers (less powerful than yours) A frugal install would allow you to easily back up and fix the sort of problems that this post began with.
remember the menu.lst file? Go to menu.lst, open the file. At the end of the line that begins with "kernel" add the following text at the end.
Save the changes, and reboot. I'm not positive this will work, but it might 
If you don't understand any of these instructions, let us know |
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bigpup
Joined: 11 Oct 2009 Posts: 3687 Location: Charleston S.C. USA |
Also can try:
Need to add this to the boot menu entry that starts your Puppy5.3.1 install. In Rox-filer (file manager) find menu.lst file. Click on it to open in text editor. Add the acpi=off to the end of the kernel line in the Puppy 5.3.1 entry. Example: kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda1 ro acpi=off Save change. Reboot computer. The change will only work after a reboot, so you will not see effect until then. _________________ I have found, in trying to help people, that the things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem. Puppy Help 101 An interactive tutorial for Puppy 5.2.5 Last edited by bigpup on Tue 10 Apr 2012, 15:51; edited 1 time in total |
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chromoite
 Joined: 02 Apr 2012 Posts: 40 |
Or press F2 then type
duh _________________ Outer Limits Fan  Puppy Linux Forum |
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bigpup
Joined: 11 Oct 2009 Posts: 3687 Location: Charleston S.C. USA |
That should do nothing for his problem. He has full install and problem is with shutdown. _________________ I have found, in trying to help people, that the things they do not tell you, are usually the clue to solving the problem. Puppy Help 101 An interactive tutorial for Puppy 5.2.5 |
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I borked my menu.lst, now a Puppy CD won't even boot
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