Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Marcel · Joined: 15 May 2005 Posts: 110 Location: Sydney, Australia

I have installed Puppy on H/disk, and boot using Grub.
Is there a way of automating Grub or the boot process so that one doesn't have to type in all the parameters? I.E: just press enter to the Grub request and all else follows without further ado?
Thanks.

Bancobusto · Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 168 Location: Vancouver Island

misunderstood the question, and have erased so as to not look like tooo much more of an arse Shocked

dvw86 · Joined: 04 May 2005 Posts: 636 Location: Washington State

Hmm, I have a dual boot system with Windows 98 and Puppy. Once I choose Puppy it boots up without any more input from me. I am thinking of erasing Windows and not even having the Grub screen. Just turn it on and up comes Puppy. I'm not sure why you would have to enter any parameters. What is it that you are having to enter at every boot?

Bruce B · Posted: Wed 27 Jul 2005, 00:54 Post subject:

It looks like grub is installed on the mbr (master boot record), but not pointing to the partition where /boot/grub/menu.lst is installed. Or there is no /boot/grub/menu.lst ??

I think you should try reinstalling grub

babbs · Posted: Wed 27 Jul 2005, 01:08 Post subject:

I dual boot Puppy and Fedora Core 3 (FC3) with grub and I don't have any problems. As FC3 was installed first, my grub was installed by anaconda, Fedora's installer.

Here is what my grub configuration file looks like:

rarsa · Posted: Wed 27 Jul 2005, 11:00 Post subject:

Create a menu.lst file in the same folder where your grub stage1 file is.

It should look something like this:

Marcel · Joined: 15 May 2005 Posts: 110 Location: Sydney, Australia

Thanks to all who responded.
Here is the sequence I have to use to boot Puppy:

grub> root (hd0,1)
grub> kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 ro
grub> boot

I tried to change the 2nd line to use hda1 instead of hda2, and found that it tried to load Mepis (unsuccessfully). I thought Mepis had been wiped when
I installed Puppy.
Is it safe for me to delete - or maybe re-format - hda1? Or must I re-install Puppy?

I will, meanwhile, try some of the suggestions people have made.
Thanks

rarsa · Posted: Wed 27 Jul 2005, 22:28 Post subject:

What OSs do you have installed and in which partitions?

Assuming that you only have Windows and puppy, here is the menu.lst

Ian · Posted: Wed 27 Jul 2005, 22:35 Post subject:

If you have Puppy installed on the second partition of your hard drive and nothing in the first partition you should be able to format partition 1 without it affecting Puppy.

Guest · Guest

I have what seems to be a residue of stuff from Mepis, on hda1.
I don't have Windows. I'll try to fix Menu.1st as suggested by Rarsa
(thanks, Rarsa - and everyone else).
Any advice about reformating hda1 - or is that too dangerous?

Marcel · Joined: 15 May 2005 Posts: 110 Location: Sydney, Australia

Oops - forgot to log in - that "Guest" was me. Confused

Bruce B · Posted: Wed 27 Jul 2005, 23:06 Post subject:

rarsa · Posted: Thu 28 Jul 2005, 00:00 Post subject:

The only danger of formating a partition that you don't want anymore is formating the wrong partition.

Formating hda1 won't modify your MBR or your hda2 at all.

I've formatted, reformatted, partitioned and repartitioned my HDD around my four core partitions without a problem (to try different distros and to reorganize partitions moving them around).

So bottom line, reformat your partition using whatever file system you want.

rarsa · Posted: Thu 28 Jul 2005, 00:03 Post subject:

Actually if you want your whole HDD for puppy you could 'move' your puppy to hda1 (I can show you how) and then resize it.

Although it may be better to have puppy in a very small partition and have your data in a different partition.

raffy · Joined: 25 May 2005 Posts: 4636 Location: Manila

Grub is automatically handled by Barry's script in Puppy, see

http://www.ph-islands.net/pupinstall/

You can reinstall to hard disk, but using Puppy 1.04, press 3 at boot time, then ENTER, so Puppy will not use partition 1 (that you want to use for installation).