(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

You may feel fear with replacing the MBR with the grub4dosconfig.
But it is more safe than shrinking the existing Windows partition.
You can boot up from CD, and easily re-install MBR.
If you like to recover the MBR of windows, you can use Windows Installer CD.

Only exception is for the PC's which has special MBR made by the manufacturer.
I have never seen such PC's but hear some PC's without CD drive and the Windows recovery system is on the HDD.
In this case from the beginning, it cannot boot up the Puppy Live CD.

For the last case we developed the installer for the Windows(95 to 7), Lucid-Puppy-Quickset-edition-511-Installer.exe.
It need not CD and does not replace the existing MBR.
See the topic:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=61404

all was going well up this point! unzipped the file, put it on USB, put it in, clicked on the folder then clicked the "install" file and got the error message above??
tried rebooting without the cd and got the message Missing operating system. Completely lost now as to what i should do next,
please help
thanx

i was unzipping with winblows, tried it with puppy, no probs! strike another 1 up for linux!!

That's good news. I don't know what your Windows extraction tool would have done to mess things up. I checked it with my own Windows third-party extractor and it worked correctly.

I got to Step 1 and when I ran gparted, xp's ntfs partition had a yellow triangle on it and I cannot partition. What does that mean? I want to do a frugal install of puppy lucid 5.2.8 along with xp on a HP desktop with 2 gb. of ram.

I already had a Linux partition, so I started at step 2, as advised by the OP.

The process went well, except that later on , Windows changed the partition flags, and grub was no longer shown at boot.

I booted the LiveCD and used the grub utility to install grub in the MBR.

Now all is well again.

Lane

That's odd. I have never seen Windows change the partition boot flags on its own. But it will happen if the GRUB entry for Windows contains the line "makeactive".

However, the one-click installer doesn't use "makeactive". Have a look at your menu.lst file.

This was exactly what I was looking for. Worked like a charm.

This method was very easy with Win XP. Can I use this method with my new Windows 7 laptop?
Thanks in advance

tpadesihelp wrote:This method was very easy with Win XP. Can I use this method with my new Windows 7 laptop?
Thanks in advance

See the notes regarding Windows 7 that rcrsn51 added to his initial post of this thread.

Monsie

There are two issues with Win7:

1. You need to split off a new partition for Puppy. When Win7 first came out, there were reports that Gparted could corrupt Windows, and it was safer to do the partitioning with Windows' own Admin tools.

Recently, I finally got to try this and discovered that Windows would not let me resize a "live" Windows partition (which makes sense). So I took a chance and did it with Gparted. It worked fine. But this was a vanilla Windows install.

2. Your new Puppy GRUB menu.lst file assumes that Windows is in the first partition - sda1 or (hd0,0) in Grub-speak. If you have a recovery partition, Windows will probably be in (hd0,1). So you will need to modify your menu.lst. Look for it in the folder /boot/grub.

I have researched the other ways of dual booting.

Using the EasyBCD for Windows 7 as outlined by rcrsn51 after installing a puppy partition with GRUB bootloader seems to me as extra effort.

This 'XP' method appears to be very straightforward and in case of changing one's mind is easy to remove.

Thus my question is what am I missing? I don't think I am seeing the whole picture yet

Thanks

tpadesihelp wrote:Thus my question is what am I missing? I don't think I am seeing the whole picture yet

In the post above yours, I have described the issues with Win7. If you have already created a Puppy partition and Win7 still works, there shouldn't be a problem with this method.

It was mentioned in the beginning that this would not work on some older machines in which bios cannot boot from the far end of a hard drive.
Is there any way to check if my laptop can handle this method?

rcrsn51 wrote:There are two issues with Win7:

1. You need to split off a new partition for Puppy. When Win7 first came out, there were reports that Gparted could corrupt Windows, and it was safer to do the partitioning with Windows' own Admin tools.

Recently, I finally got to try this and discovered that Windows would not let me resize a "live" Windows partition (which makes sense). So I took a chance and did it with Gparted. It worked fine. But this was a vanilla Windows install.

Well, I just resized my Windows 7 ntfs partition using Win7 resize partition tool whilst it was running, and it worked fine at least on this netbook running Win7 starter. The main windows partition on this Acer netbook machine is actually /dev/sda3, which is what I shrunk prior to creating an ext4 partition on new partition /dev/sda4. Prior to that I was installing Puppy frugals directly onto the /dev/sda3 ntfs partition and booting with grub4dos per the method described in ICPUG's Lin'N'Win website pages for Win7. I'm still using that grub4dos arrangement to boot the new Linux installs I have made to /dev/sda4.

No reading of instructions required using these:

https://archive.org/details/Puppy_Linux ... _Installer

In Windows: select the right Puppy - download - doubleclick. That's it.

yes the win32 installer is a good one.

Another way recently retested with a windows 7 laptop is to rename bootmgr to bootwin, name grldr to bootmgr and replace... make a menu.lst with yer pup and have chainloader /bootwin ...thats the basic gist...no touching mbr, simple and works.
Could add a frugal pup to avoid repartitioning...

Just rename the original bootmgr to restore the original windows boot.

mike

A vote in favour of using windows to shrink it's ntfs C: partition to provide a Linux partition for puppies.

Twice, using Windows 8, I've shrunk the active C: partition, without any problem.
Once I shrunk a different ntfs partition, and the only problem I had is that it complained that it didn't have enough space. But I simply reduced the amount of shrinkage I was requesting until it worked.
So using windows to shrink an ntfs partition is for the faint harted.

Once I used gparted to shrink the C: partition of a Windows XP machine. Next boot of XP required a chkdsk. I would never do this again.

The other thing I would never do again, is run puppy off an ntfs partition, with save files on the ntfs partition.
For many years I did this on my XP machine. It got to the point where every time I booted back to XP, I wondered if I would need to do a chkdsk this time.

Now I have a Windows 8 laptop, with an ext4 partition on the end that contains all my puppies. I boot using grub4dos on an sdcard, (the laptop sees this as a usb device). I boot windows by getting grub4dos to reboot using the MBR of the hard drive, (or remove the sdcard, and reboot).
The Windows install remains pristine, and puppy runs off a Linux partition.

gyro

It got to the point where every time I booted back to XP, I wondered if I would need to do a chkdsk this time

.

welll puppy does not cleanly unmount the partition its uses so that could end up setting the dirty flag on NTFS...perhaps why there are those cautionary notes relating to that file system...this happens if I use puppy on ext3 and I access from windows too...same effectm same cause. The solution for me is the sfs save so puppy is totally in ram so any partitions are free to cleanly unmount when shutting down....problem solved in that case.

You could rewrite the initrd but then you would have to call it Slax

mike