booting 1.02 was a success, but cannot write to hard drive

[newuser]

thanks to the contributors for Puppy 1.02. There has not been problems doing what i need to do, besides writing the user preferences onto the FAT16 hard disk. How can i make Puppy write user prefs on HD? it tries to scan the HD to write, but it says i cannot write anything onto HD...and writes to ramdrive instead.

success story: I copied Puppy onto a CDR at 4x, as burning at 48x gave boot problems because the CD was not recognized. as it got into boot procedures, i got nervous, until it began asking me for keyboard preferences. at last i was on the Puppy desktop on my old computer!

[Bruce B]

A had a similiar problem a while back with a 0.9.x version.

It seemed to me that Puppy didn't want to write to FAT16. I don't know for sure if that was the problem, but I think so. I made a FAT32 partition and Puppy found it and used it automatically. Since then I've been using FAT32 for Puppy with no problems at all.

???

[Lobster]

If you have critical or important data then I can understand a small degree of caution . . .

Personally I have lost more data through backups (done by a clumsy crusctacean) than not . . .

More and more I tend towards storing data on line . . .

However . . . Puppys are brave. It was interesting that someone recently posted that the sound problem was cabling. Quite often we pretend to be smart. You will notice that Chief Pup Barry often askes for advice and admits ignorance.

You will find useful projects have developed from people not knowing. We did not know much about wikis, the first was spamilated. The new one is proving robust and popular. Many people contributing a little here, a little there. Our IRC channel started from an expeience I had with kanotix.

The point I am making is Puppy is fun BECAUSE we do not know where we are going or what will turn up until it comes our way . . .

Part of the Linux philosophy is "Take loads out and put a little back". I have found that by taking risks and getting things wrong, I have gained, when I try to correct my mistakes.

So to be a pup is to chase the butterfly. Frisk. Run and explore . . . and it just so happens that the new Pup v 1.0.2 is ready for download. John Murga is creating an Opera special release of 1.0.2 in 50 meg that will be ready soon. GuestToo is probably cooking up new Dotpups as we speak. Ian is probably helping out someone on IRC right now.

The Sun is shining in London and all is Puppy dog well . . .

so what was the question?

[Ian]

Puppy looks for a fat32 or ext2 filesystem on hard drives, if you have a hard drive that has DOS or Win 95a it will have the fat16 filesystem.

One way to let Puppy write to your HD is to repartition it and create a partition formatted with fat32 or ext2.

If you do not want to repartition you can shrink your existing partition, if you have enough space and create an extended partition with a fat32 partition in it.

You would probably need 128 to 256M of space.
There are many utilities available to allow you to do this.