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?
Will Puppy boot in a laptop with no HD?
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.
[url=http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=69321][color=blue]Puppy Help 101 - an interactive tutorial for Lupu 5.25[/color][/url]
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
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