Installing Puppy to hd; partitioning questions

[trentster222]

I made a linux partition with cfdisk, but when I try the HD install, I get to step 3(Option 2), and it asks me to unmount the CD. But wait...puppy is running on the CD... so I hit the unmount cdrom button, and it fails to unmount, so I am stuck!

[trentster222]

Well, I'm just going to try again. It's a little hard to get answers at 2 AM!

[Lobster]

you should when booting into Puppy to do the install select option 2 (not to effect the HD)

So rebbot your puppy disk and do that - there is also info on the wiki . . . or somewhere - try the sticky above (not mine - Flashes)

Good luck - sorry for quick reply - new Puppy arriving shortly . . .

[Bancobusto]

Good luck!

I must say that in my case, the installer wouldn't recognize my dvd-drive, which is what I booted the CD off of...

During the install, it insisted that there was no cd in the drive, which it needed to copy vmlinuz (and maybe something else)...

I had to drop the cd down to my cd-burner, which according to Puppy is my cdrom... not according to my bios, or my Debian install, but hey, whatever....


Cheers, wish i was more knowledgable to help you

[trentster222]

I am using a floppy that has zapart and fdisk. After going into dos, running zapart, and fdisk(to create partition?) I type in the command prompt "format c:" It takes a couple of minutes to format, and then I restart. My problem earlier, was the there wasn't a large enough ramdisk, and there wasn't a formated partition (I think). Now I will try to run puppy using the live CD, now that I have a partition to put some of the "personal settings" in. But the quetion is, will this thing work? I guess I will know in a couple of minutes. I'm sure that I can get this thing working using trial and error.....right? (This is my 4th time having to format my hard drive tonight!)

[trentster222]

Ok, i'll press 2!


I hope you don't mean 3!

Boy! I love all nighters!

[trentster222]

...aah, a catch-22 situation...?!?!?! If I "HIDE" the partition, I have to run from the cd, but if its running off the cd, it can;t be unmounted.. AHH! Ok then... I'll read on.... "I am theorising here, have not actually tried any onf this"....!!!!!!!!....It looks like im not going to sleep tonight!

[trentster222]

Unable to mount a persistent home storage partition on root...Blah blah blah..Pausing...blah blah blah...Computer on fire...blah...Ok then...now its running off the cd again...for sure, because it said it was....so..yh...what do i do now?

Am I stuck having to use the cd rom forever? Maybe I could just copy the cd 2 the hard drive(Although im sure that wont really work)...hmm...I guess I'll have to wait!

[Bancobusto]

you have an existing ext2 partition?

if so go start/setup/install puppy to hard drive

what are the actual errors when following this method?

let me know, i'm listening......

[trentster222]

Does puppy recognize linux partitions?

*Edit* maybe not..Time to format again!

*edit 2* Ok, Done with Fdisk. I can format it, to make it fat 32, and then I can run puppy, otherwise I get some errors, and all the seetings are run off of the disc. or maybe I just need to format only 500 mb, and then make another partition

[trentster222]

I think I almost have everything in order, but when I'm done, I will have 2 partitions. One that will have puppy, and the other will be useless. My question is, can I delete the second partition, and make the first one take up all of the space, without having to delete everything on the first partition?

[BarryK]

Unable to mount a persistent home storage partition on root...Blah blah blah..Pausing...blah blah blah...Computer on fire...blah...Ok then...now its running off the cd again...for sure, because it said it was....so..yh...what do i do now?

Am I stuck having to use the cd rom forever? Maybe I could just copy the cd 2 the hard drive(Although im sure that wont really work)...hmm...I guess I'll have to wait!

I presume that the PC doesn't have much RAM, so Puppy was unable to copy usr_cram.fs off the CD, so the CD remained in use.
If that's the case, create a Linux swap partition on the hard drive to increase the effective RAM size.

[raffy]

While typing, I just saw Barry's advice about the RAM, so I have nothing more to say [snip]

also try reading

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

[Guest]

Ok then, that makes sense (I guess), seeing as I've tried everything I could think of, using all my windows boot disks. Wow, using windows boot disks to install puppy. It's like one of the oxymorons! I must unlearn what I have learned.

[trentster222]

whoops! that was me. Anyways, isn't 80mb ram enough? I thought the magic number was 64.

*EDIT* Also, am I going to have to have 2 partitions? no matter what?

[trentster222]

ugh, after my genius idea of making 3 partitions, one fat32, one linux, and one linux swap, puppy loads into the ramdisk, and freezes before I get to pick my resoultion. Time for another reformat!

[trentster222]

Okay, its running off of the cd, but..This will let me get all my partitions correct before installing. I am running cfdisk on hda seeing as its the only harddrive I have. It currently has only freespace, and no partition. How should I begin partitioning it?

[Ian]

Boot the Puppy CD and use fdisk or cfdisk from the commandline to create a Linux native partition and a Linux swap partition.
The swap partition should be twice the size of the RAM in your machine.

Then use the mkfs command to format the Linux native partition which should be hda1:

mke2fs /dev/hda1

then the swap partition

mkswap /dev/hda2

then when you install Puppy you will have to use the swapon command to start using the swap partition.

There is more information about swap partitions on the forum so if you do a search you will find out more.

[trentster222]

thank you! I will try that out. Oh, and sorry about making you read on and on about my problems!

[Ian]

To create the partitions using cfdisk just follow the menu at the bottom it is reasonably easy especially if you have been using a commandline tool to create partitions.

You only have to ensure that you make the Linux native partition an ext2 partition and the swap a swap partition.