Will Puppy boot in a laptop with no HD?

[vientito]

scenario: a laptop with a damaged HD. every other hardware works.

in principle would i be able to boot this laptop with a puppylinux ? what special option i need to attach in order to bypass any particular kernel modules?

las time i did something similar to that on my friend's laptop with a damaged IDE HD, it stopped at "Loading kernel modules" without advancing further.

is puppy pfix=ram enuff for the purpose?

[Flash]

Yes, a Puppy 2.16 CD should boot in your laptop, as long as it has enough RAM. 128 MB should do it. Since the laptop doesn't have a functioning HDD, you shouldn't need to use the pfix=ram boot option; Puppy will have no choice but to run in RAM. If you have a flash memory stick plugged into a USB port when Puppy boots, Puppy will save settings to it when you shut down. You could try multisession CD, but that is unlikely to work from a laptop.

[Bruce B]

You didn't mention in what way the drive is damaged. Depending on the type of damage you should disconnect the power plug and ribbon cable.

And if you did that, might as well remove the drive also.

[Flash]

Thanks, Bruce. Good point. It's possible that a hard disk drive that's trying to work would screw everything up. Still, it can't hurt to try booting Puppy first. If it won't work, then plan B is to open the computer and disconnect or remove the hd.

[sunburnt]

Boot from CD? Should work also, except if HD is jammin it up.

I prefer a USB flash drive or if LapTop has card reader then maybe flash card.

[paulsiu]

If your laptop support USB boot, you can just boot from USB.

If your laptop doesn't support USB boot, you can boot from floppy or CD-ROM (assuming they still work), which can then bootstrap to USB.

Puppy can also do multi-session disc so you can boot from the Puppy CD or DVD and then write the changes back to disc. In practice, I find that this often doesn't work because many CD-ROM and DVD can't boot from multisession disc.

If your computer doesn't have a CD-ROM or Floppy but has a network connection, you may still be able to boot from ethernet if your laptop support booting from PXE (I think there was another thread on that). I was able to do this with other distros, but I haven't tried it with Puppy.

Paul