Boot through USB hub: "could not locate usr_cram.fs&quo

[Na3than]

I know earlier Puppies stored usr_cram.fs inside image.gz, and current releases don't. But my ThinkPad T40 sees its two onboard USB ports as though they're on a hub, and I think that's what's causing a "could not locate file usr_cram.fs" error during startup (see here).

So I thought, if the RAM disk image is being extracted from the USB drive successfully, maybe I could remaster image.gz, putting usr_cram.fs back into the RAM disk and get it up and running before losing contact with the USB partition. According to Barry's How Puppy Works page, a USB boot still looks for usr_cram.fs in "/" first, before going back to the USB partition.

I remastered image.gz using these instructions (under "new image.gz from scratch"), putting usr_cram.fs at "/". I added "ramdisk_size=61440" to syslinux.cfg at the appropriate point in the Install Puppy USB Drive setup wizard to ensure I could load the whole expanded image (less than 59MB) into the RAM disk.

Well, usr_cram.fs still fails to load, leaving me at a BusyBox command shell. A directory listing confirmed that usr_cram.fs was not at / where it's supposed to be.

I saw that /dev/sda1 was mounted on /mnt/home, and from there I copied image.gz to "/" and unpacked it. I then mounted the uncompressed image as a loopback device on /mnt/data and examined the contents, and usr_cram.fs is right there with bin, dev, etc, and all the other standard Puppy image contents.

What did I do wrong that prevented usr_cram.fs from being copied to / when the RAM disk was created? It looks like some of the directories in my image didn't make it into the RAM disk either, like proc0, root0 and var0, which I copied from the standard image. Did I miss a step in the remastering process?

Gentle advice appreciated.