How to Recover from Broken DVD/CD drive? [SOLVED]

[Sky Aisling]

Hello,

I ran Tahrpup64.6.0.5 from a Live CD until last week when the DVD/CD drive crashed.

My goal now is to transfer the system to an internal HDD and continue down the yellow brick road without a DVD/CD drive.

The machine is an HP HDX Premium Series with dual Intel CPUs.

I keep my personal data on sda2. The Live CD system booted from sda1.

To Recover...
I made a live flash drive with Tahrpup64.6.0.6-uefi.iso.
This gave me access to the original files on sda1 and sda2.
I made a temp savefile on the flash drive.
I rebooted the flash drive and then copied the original savefile to the flash drive.
I thought I would be presented with two choices of savefiles when the flash drive rebooted (the old and the temp).
However, only the temp savefile is recognized when the flash drive is rebooted.
Could the fact that I made the recovery flash drive with tahrpup64.6.0.6-uefi and NOT tahrpup64.6.0.5 be part of the issue? Different kernels?

The goal is to run my old system from the internal HDD and free up the USB port currently holding the rescue flash drive.

How do I do this without completely clearing the paritions to zero and starting from scratch?
Or is it easier just to start from scratch again?

Yes, I've made backups of the original savefile and personal data.

If nothing else, I'd like to recover bookmarks from the browsers on the original system.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions or insights.

[april]

My initial thought was that when you boot from the usb drive you go to root and find the old savefile . Copy it across to the usb then close down without saving . Reboot and it should find the copied savefile.

If you now look on the usb you will probably find one of those savefiles has a different name perhaps with some letters before "savefile"

[peterw]

You could try this:
1. Boot up Puppy from USB.
2. In sda1 or sda2 create a directory "Tahr64"
3. Open up the Puppy iso and copy the revealed files to "Tahr64" directory.
4. Run Grub4dos and only search on sda and accept defaults making sure menu1 goes onto sda1.
5. Reboot and remove USB stick
6. Boot into Tahr64 and localise it for language, etc.
7. Power off and create save file.
8. Boot up Tahr64 and open up any save file to transfer any wanted items into Tahr64.

You can have as many different Puppies (including Fatdogs) as you want as frugal installs as long as you rerun Grub4dos or edit menu1. If you want to get access from any of the Puppies it is easiest to store the data alongside the Puppy frugal directories.

[drunkjedi]

Hey sky,
Did you try specifically tell location of savefile to use by using kernel boot parameters?
Although I had sometimes problem with it in tahr.


Just remove the copy of savefile from usb, just so the system will select the one on hdd, add some boot parameters to your bootloader config.
Boot pupy from usb in ram, it would free your usb to be removed.
Remove your usb stick.....
That should do it.

That's what I do with my Fatdog64, my savefile and basesfs are in sda7, and as location is given for both in config file so boot time is also less.

[bigpup]

I rebooted the flash drive and then copied the original savefile to the flash drive.
I thought I would be presented with two choices of savefiles when the flash drive rebooted (the old and the temp).
However, only the temp savefile is recognized when the flash drive is rebooted.

Are both saves in the same location on the drive?

Look at the names of the two save files.
They need to be slightly different.

example:
(for 64 bit Tahrpup)
tahr64save
tahr64save-something

Do not have anything added to the front of the name.
The name needs to begin with tahr64save.

[Sky Aisling]

Thank you april , ,peterw ,drunkjedi , bigpup ...

Issue is solved. I cherry picked ideas from peterw and drunkjedi suggestions.

Running in Flash Drive mode:

I used GParted and deleted sda1 (see screenshot from original post).
I set up a new partition as ext 4 primary and installed tahrpup64_6.0.5 as a frugal install within a folder.
I rebooted without a savefile.

Running in HDD mode:

The reboot without savefile put me into nascent mode.
I copied the old savefile from an external medium into the frugal folder on sda1.
I rebooted saying 'no' to creating a savefile.
The final reboot presented my old screen layout and browser preferences and bookmarks.

The only sticky wicket was Puppy asking for an upgrade to 6.0.6 at bootup time.
I said 'yes' to the upgrade and lost some formating on the home screen, but, it was easily corrected.

Thank you all for taking time to help.