Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[carenrose]

A couple questions here.

First off, Puppy 431. No dual boot, just Puppy. I'm relatively new to all this.

I can't get Puppy to boot from HD. Getting tired of booting from CD!

Time for the long story ...

Playing around with new (used, old, but cheap!) laptop, did a full install at first, had many issues with grub but eventually got it to boot (ish) from hard drive but kept getting kernel panic.
Then gave up, reformatted. Frugal install this time. Back to issues with grub.
Attempt to boot from hard drive -> get to grub menu -> select option to boot puppy -> computer reboots itself. Never boots to Puppy. Tried grub4dos, same EXACT thing. Neither one works! Why?????



Question 2: not a grub or puppy problem! My BIOS will not boot from CD more than about 3 times in a row. Very odd, and very very frustrating when trying to work out issues with grub. Even on the first try, it will take FOREVER trying to read the disc, and it sounds like it's spinning it in short bursts (BBZPT-BBZPT-BBZPT-BBZPT) rather than, well, the normal whirring sound (rrrrZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZHHHHHHHHHHH) ... lol ...

After it's successfully booted from cd maybe twice in a row, it will fail to recognize it as a bootable cd at all. Very odd. It will try for about the same amount of time to read the disc, doing the same sound (I think) but it fails. If I power off the computer in between, but only for a short amount of time, it will still fail. I have to WAIT for a while, perhaps more than 5 minutes, before it will boot from cd again. It's as if it needs to cool down, or something.
Yet ... it does not seem to be a hardware issue ... I have watched 2-hour long dvd's in this system with no issue. In fact, I did that just to test if it was a possible hardware issue. Once in the OS, seem to have not even shadows of a problem.

Oh, I have not had any problems with this disc, and the same thing happened with my XP disc (the only other OS disc I own).



Question 3:
Also, why is everything I install going into the swap partition? I get that puppy is designed to run in ram, but ... I dunno, I'm confused. If I didn't have a swap partition, would it literally try to stuff all this into ram? I guess so.
Anyways, what files can I move to the main partition of my hd? I've already moved /root/my-documents over, but how about everything else? /usr, /bin, /etc, and so on?, then symlink it? (Obviously not like /mnt)

[Flash]

It sounds like a hardware compatibility problem. First of all, how was your Puppy CD burned? (What burning program did you use?) If the laptop has a DVD drive, try a live Puppy from a DVD instead of CD. I find that a DVD generally works better (faster and more reliable; less overhead on the disk) than a CD for almost anything. Also, laptop optical drives don't seem to work exactly like desktop drives. Also, sometimes a different brand of CD will work better in a particular drive. (Rewritable CD or DVD works as well as write-once for live Puppy.)

The simplest, most reliable way I've found to burn a live CD or DVD is using Puppy's Menu -> Multimedia -> Burniso2cd.

How did you install Puppy on the hard disk? If you reformatted the hard disk and Puppy is the only OS on it, I think you shouldn't need Grub at all. I could be wrong though; I've never installed Puppy on a hard disk.

[Ray MK]

SOME GENERAL NOTES - HOPEFULLY USEFUL TO ALL.

Recent Puppy developments provide a massive choice of newer Puppy's all very suitable for Netbooks.
Here are some of my favorites,
waryNOP-511, racyNOP-522, quirkyNOP-120, Saluki-021/022/023, Lucid-528, Dpup-Exprimo.
If you have a 64bit proc. then Fatdog64 and Lighthouse64 are superb.

IMHO,
The simplest and most reliable way to boot, dual-boot or multi-boot Puppy is to use grub4dos,
installed to a USB stick or an SDcard. (although the exact same proceedure can be used on a HDD partition)

After downloading your chosen ISO's and burning one of them to a CD, boot it and use it to do the following.

Install grub4dos to a vfat formatted usb stick or SDcard after,

1) first making sure it is marked as bootable (using Gparted),
2) creating at least one Puppy folder containing the puppy files (copied from ISO) required to boot,
(you can put as many different Puppy's in thier individually named folders, as space or desire allows)
3) tell grub4dos to install itself to that disk only (making sure you tick the appropriate box),
4) grub4dos will automagically search the disk and prepare a suitable menu.lst file and install itself to the selected disk (it will read multiple disk's if so instructed).

Finally - reboot - and go.
The above proceedure can be repeated ad-infinitum.

(Saluki, Lucid-528, Exprimo and all the later NOP's have a good version of grub4dos).

If you prefer to boot from HDD or usbHDD (instead of USB or SDcard) Prepare the HDD first by:
1) using Gparted to make 3 ext partitions of roughly equal size and then make a 4th swap partition of approximately 500/800mb in size.
2) flag any partition as bootable (1st is ok in this instance)
3) make a folder(s) on 1st partition named Saluki (luki, luci, rNOP, wNOP, Pup1, P2, P3, or whatever)
4) copy the essential puppy files (or all of them if unsure) from the ISO/CD to your folder(s)

Now start grub4dos and follow the instructions.

A note of CAUTION -
the above use of Gparted assumes that you have no desire to keep any other OS's or files that may be on the disk.
Anything that needs to be saved should be backed-up first.

HTH - regards - Ray

The above was written some time ago and more recent Puppies are also now available.
eg: Precise / Slacko / Wary and others. Another excellent laptop Puppy, is Fluppy.

[carenrose]

[OscarTalks]

Hello carenrose,

I am not sure of the features of 4.3.1 because I have only experimented with more recent Puppies. I would suggest trying one of the current releases, maybe Wary 5.3 if the laptop is very old but the others may work too.

Burning the downloaded .iso image to a DVD on another computer will be fine if you can do that. There is definitely no need to do it on the same machine. Just make sure you are burning an image and not a copy of the .iso

I am a little suspicious of the optical drive even though you have been able to play DVD's, but go over things again from scratch with a new Puppy Live DVD and things may go OK.

Format the HD again with GParted. Create your Linux partition (with boot flag - have you done this?) and swap partition (1GB or so).

Installed Puppy files should not be going into the swap partition and I don't think you should be trying to move anything in or out of there. Use Puppy Universal Installer from the menu to install into the Linux partition and then follow up with Grub or Grub4Dos. PUI provides you with the lines which you need to have in your menu1st file. Edit them if necessary to make sure your Grub menu offers the correct options including booting Puppy and possibly an option to boot Puppy in RAM only mode.

[Flash]

I agree with OscarTalks; a DVD that was properly burned in another computer will boot in your laptop even though the laptop only has a DVD reader. If a computer that has a DVD burner will boot the Puppy live CD you have, you can properly burn a DVD (with Puppy's Menu -> Multimedia -> Burniso2cd). You can put the Puppy iso on a USB flash drive, plug it into the computer you'll be burning the DVD in, then tell Burniso2cd where to find the iso.

[carenrose]

Well, back to this thread.

I have replaced the optical drive. Near the end it started getting worse and worse, it really was broken.

And, thanks to this dying drive, when I installed, the kernel did not get copied over correctly. It was the most obvious solution and it took me forever to figure out. The size it was supposed to be is something like 2200 kb ... it was 16.

Yeah.

[Flash]

Not much closure there.