Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[ackptui]

Just had the entrails exposed (IBM Aptiva 2170-800 AMD K2-6) and put in a multiple USB PCI card and a used 80GB PATA HDD. The old HDD was so loud that the disk seeks made it sound like a popcorn popper, so great improvement there towards "silent running." The USB PCI card had an internal port on it, so I hung an old mp3 player that went thru the wash and no longer functions, but on which the flash still works. The BIOS only has options to boot from CD, FDD, and HDD, so no way to boot the flash. Is there a way to put a bootloader on the HDD that would immediately look to the flash to continue the boot, to get around the BIOS limitations?

[amigo]

Yes, you must put a bootloader on the HDD -or on FDD or CD. Then you place the linux kernel and initrd on the same drive. So, from the machiens point of view, it 'boots' the bootloader, which loads and boots the kernel and initrd. In Puppy terminology this would be like a frugal install. But any distro can be made to boot this way -even ones which normally use no initrd. In this case, though, a minimal initrd would be required as it must look for the linux installation and munt that as the 'root' filesystem. So, your machine cannot be made USB-bootable, but by putting the kernel and initrd on a drive which your machine does recognize, the kernel can be loaded along with this minimal initrd.

[Les Kerf]

Try the PloP Boolmanager. It can be used on a floppy, cd, or installed to your HDD and will allow booting from USB.
Les

[darkcity]

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/USBBootwithoutBIOSSupport

[rcrsn51]

[ackptui]