reformating hard drive to boot puppy

[bobachon]

Wanting to install Puppy on an old pentium pc....hard drive is 1.2 gig.
I have run puppy from CD ok, but want to have machine boot up from hard drive. I am a linux newbie.....assume that I will need to somehow format hard drive after I boot up from CD, and then ? Any suggestions on getting the linux format and file system setup.

[rcrsn51]

The tools you need are already in Puppy. Look in Control Panel for the GParted partition manager and in Setup for the Puppy universal installer.

It's best to start Puppy in "safe mode". When it starts to boot off the CD, type the command: puppy pfix=ram

When you reformat the drive, ext2 should be good enough. Actually, the old FAT32 filesystem that is probably on the drive now would work fine, but you probably want to erase all the old Windows stuff anyway.

When you run the universal installer, choose the Coexist method. This is also known as a Frugal install since it just copies the four crucial Puppy files from the CD onto your hard drive.

Finally, the installer will want to install the Grub bootloader so your computer can boot off its hard drive. Since Puppy will be the only OS on the machine, you should install Grub on the MBR. Read the on-screen instructions carefully because this procedure can be a bit tricky.

[alienjeff]

Depending on how much RAM you have on that machine, you will want to consider a swap partition when formatting. The much-discussed-and-cussed "standard" for swap partition size is twice your physical RAM size.

The bottom line is this: if you're not opening a bunch of resource/RAM hungry apps at once, you might not need a huge swap partition. Also, the more physical RAM, the less dependence on swap.

Remember when using gparted to "flag" the first partition as "bootable."

Best wished and good luck.