(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

After some messing around and reading all of the info here on USB Flash Puppy I still have some questions.

1st) Does the Flash drive have to be used on the system it was built on? It works fine on that PC but on others with diffrent amounts of drives it never loads X.

2nd) Is it the fstab that is causeing the problem? I also note that the USB flash drive is found on the PC that it was created on. In other words Linux finds it linke any other hardware. I don't see that on the others?

The concept of Flash Puppy is great though. I love the idea of having a fully functional OS you can carry aroung in your pocket

Puppy should boot on other machines from USB flash drive.

Have you tried booting from the Puppy CD on these other machines to see if you encounter the same problems.

Well this is Puppy CD on one of the offending PC's. Seems to work OK. It can not find the usr_cram.fs and puts up the red message that X will not load. Same USB device works fine on another PC. The usr_cram.fs is on the USB device as I can see it there if I look. I also cannot mount the USB Flash Drive after I get the command promt lsmod shows that the correct modules are being loaded and it should be there. As it does not load usr_cram.fs I cannot look at the logs as far as I can tell Maybe I looked in the wrong place

Well I made a new Flash Puppy from the offending PC. It boots but blows up after it gets to

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0.
Unable to handle NULL pointer dereference at virtual addess 00000014 and so on

It looks like you have a problem with that machine, does anything else boot on it and you could try swapping memory sticks around or different ones.

Well everything else works fine. I can boot the Puppy CD and other Linuxes and Win XP so it's probably not the PC itself

Got Puppy 1.0.5 and am redoing the Flash Drive but I have tried this on at lest 5 PC's and only one works. I get various errors on the other PC's this is from the one that works and the exact same Flash Drive does not work on any other PC that I have tried it on.

Well Whoop De DO it worked this time on the PC that gave me a hard time to start with. This is Puppy 1.0.5. Now to see if it works on any other PC This may have something to do with the Flash Drive as I picked up a couple at Wal Mart for cheap. I may get a better quality (more expensive) Flash Drive and see if that makes a diffrence I really like Puppy Linux at least I have not had the Puppy Live CD give me too much trouble although that did fail on one fairly new PC I tried it on. But I suppose that is to be expected. Come to think of it that one had Win 2000 on it and I needed to manually copy the pup001 file there so that does not count

Could you supply the details of the Wal Mart flash drives to see if anyone else has had problems with the same model.

SimpleTech USB Flash Drive 128 MB $15 each at Wally World

I picked up a SanDisk 1gib Flash Drive so I'll give it a try and see if its more reliable that the El Cheapos that I got to start with I just got those to see how Flash Puppy worked and to use as floppy disks if nothing else. I have not had any problems accessing files on the Simple Tech Flash Drives only with booting them for some reason. They boot on some PC's but not on all PC's. I have been useing R/W cdroms as Floppy disks for quite some time as nothing will fit on a 1.44 mb disk any more

I had close to the same troble .
I updated the syslinux to 3.11 that fixed all my head akes .
Do a search on the forum there is info on it.

Yeah I already did that. I searched the forum and read all the stuff about Flash Puppy I could. I think the cheap Flash Drives are a problem as one commited suicide when I tried to load Flash Puppy from it. Wal Mart will probably give me a new one if I take it back The other 1 Gig Flash Drive will not boot on any PC I tried it on but it does work fine for storage. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that it has some sofware preloaded on it ? I may take the software off and try again.

After removing all the files on the SanDisk 1gig Flash Drive and reformating it twice I got Flash Puppy to boot from it. In fact this is from the Flash Puppy now I have not tried it on any other PC yet so no telling if it works on other PC's

BadLife wrote:After removing all the files on the SanDisk 1gig Flash Drive and reformating it twice I got Flash Puppy to boot from it. In fact this is from the Flash Puppy now I have not tried it on any other PC yet so no telling if it works on other PC's

I just got a i gig today i used the syslinux that is in 105 it would onley boot on 1 comp.
Updated to 3.11 syslinux now it boots on all my comp,s

I am glad that works for you but I use the latest version of syslinux 3.11 and it make no diffrence for me Not sure where the problem is because I have tried this on a lot of diffrent PC's and it's not been very successful even on brand new PC's from Dell and Gateway. All my stuff at home is built from scratch but I have no problems with Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD or shudder Win XP on any of them

It almost seems like the USB Flash Drive has to be totally empty and freshly formatted in order for this to work. If you have any other data on the Flash Drive it seems to mess it up. If you had any other data on the Flash Drive it will not work untill you format it. I seem to have to format 2 times for some reason. If I put any thing else on the Flash Drive it will boot but not find the user_cram.fs or whatever its called