How to boot Puppy 1.0.6 from a SCSI drive?(Solved)

[Guest]

For the past few days I've been struggling with booting Puppy from my USB thumbdrive. My BIOS doesn't support it. However, I came across a solution that might work with a little modification. I installed loadlin on Windows and copied vmlinuz, image.gz, and usr_cram.fs to its directory. I am using the FreeDOS CD to actually run loadlin. Puppy starts booting, but fails when it tries to mount the root drive or something. The only option I have specified is root=/dev/sda1 (my USB drive, which also contains the main Puppy files). I think the problem is because the kernel and initrd are on a SCSI drive, and Puppy doesn't support SCSI (except for USB drives, and that support isn't loaded until later). Under Mandriva 2006, my drives are:
/dev/sda1 - Windows 2000 (and Puppy files)
/dev/sda2 - Empty ext3
/dev/sda3 - Swap
/dev/hda1 - Mandriva 2006
/dev/sdb1 - USB Drive
/dev/sr0 - First cdrom drive (SCSI)
/dev/hdc - Second cdrom drive (IDE)
When I boot Puppy from the cd, only hda, hdc, and sdb (which shows up as sda in Puppy) are detected. Is there a modified version of Puppy that supports SCSI? Or could I modify it myself? I'm not a linux expert, but I have compiled LFS before, and could probably do it if it was just a matter of reconfiguring the kernel.

[BlackAdder]

If you are using a CD anyway, you could try the method suggested in this thread.
It has been working fine for me. It works with later releases of Puppy than 1.0.4, and you don't have to use such an absurdly large value for PFILE size unless you want to fill the USB drive with Puppy space. 131072 would give a pup100 file of 128MB.
I'm not sure about SCSI support and if/when it gets loaded.

[Guest]

Okay, but I really want to load usr_cram.fs from the USB drive so I can install my own programs. Also, SCSI support does not get loaded at all. The only SCSI support is for USB drives. My question was whether I could add the necessary drivers myself. If I could get my hands on the kernel source, I think I could do it. Or would I need a running copy of Puppy?

[ninjabob7]

Oh, yeah, don't know if this is important, but when I leave out the root=/dev/xxx option, it tries to read my Mandriva partition (hda1), says Welcome to Mandriva 2006, then crashes when it can't find /dev/sda2. Weird.

[BlackAdder]

Dredging in very fallible memory, I think the logic is that Puppy will look for usr_cram.fs on PHOME and if it matches the size for the current release, it will load it from there, if not then will revert to CD-ROM if available. Loading from CD-ROM may be faster then from USB 1.1 - something to play with, perhaps.
If you want to "install" extra programs e.g. dot pups, they are normally stored in the pupxxx file, usr_cram is read-only. Unionfs is used by Puppy to merge read-only and read-write into /usr. Sorry, if that is a very simplistic description.
There is usr_devx.fs to provide a compilation environment, and you can read about compiling the kernel and modules by going to http://www.goosee.com/puppy, clicking on the USB tab and following the link.

Hope this helps.

[BlackAdder]

Had a look at modules-2.4.29-complete.tar.gz - available from the Ibiblio download site. There is a large number of SCSI modules in the archive there. One or more of those might help you see a SCSI drive after boot-up.

[Guest]

Okay, I tried to compile the kernel like the instructions said, but it didn't work. It crashed at the 'make bzImage' step. 'make menuconfig' also didn't work; it said it couldn't find ncurses. I tried installing the libncurses-devel package (or something like that), but it couldn't read the package from the CD or something. I used 'make config' instead and left most of the settings alone except the SCSI ones. I am compiling on Mandriva 2006 (formerly Mandrake), and I don't want to install another distribution. Any ideas what went wrong? The error code from make was 1.

[BlackAdder]

Sorry, but others will have to help with the compile problem. I have only compiled using Vector Linux or Puppy. Neither of those gave an error in the make steps.

[Guest]

Ok, I got everything working! I added aic7xxx.o from the modules tarball and edited /etc/rc.d/rc.modules to load it on startup. Then, after testing it, i made an iso and burned it to CD. It works fine, and I am using it right now. If anyone wants the iso, email me at mike5713 AT gmail DOT com. I can also send the modified image.gz.

[J_Rey]

Also, FYI, it appears that Barry is working on adding SCSI support with Puppy Linux 2.0.0. See the developer news page for the latest.