Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

bertiec · Joined: 01 May 2010 Posts: 11

Mine is not a dual boot System. My disk is partitioned and sda1 is ext3 formatted - 37GB
with a Linux swap partition on sda5 - 1.6 GB.
I can boot up happily onto a cd containing puppy-511 with both the puppy sfs and my own, larger, sfs.

1)I attempted to follow rcrsn51's article: How to do a One-Click Installation of Puppy.
With the puppy-522 cd inserted in my laptop. I switched on and entered
puppy pfix=ram
at the boot prompt.

After the message: "performing a 'switch root' to the layered filesystem..."
the next message was "Kernel panic - root not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"
I had to withdraw the power lead and eject and reinsert the battery before I could boot again - successfully with the puppy-511 cd.
My bios boot sequence is 1)hd, 2) cdrom but presently my compaq laptop refuses to
boot from hd. - I need to have my cd (with puppy-511) inserted. This may be because
my MBR is not right for Linux.

2) I again tried booting off the Puppy-520 cd. This time without entering anything at the
boot prompt. Again I had the same kernel panic message, only further along - after telling me that it was about to save the old sfs in /tmp. (It never did.)

playdayz · Joined: 25 Apr 2008 Posts: 3705

You will often get a kernel panic if the cd is bad. I think you mean Lucid 5.20 rather than "puppy-522."

If Puppy has written a bad lupu-520.sfs to the hard disk you can also get a kernel panic because when lupu-520 boots it will read the sfs on disk if it is there even if it is bad.. I would boot 511 and make sure there is nothing like that on your hard disk. Can the hard disk be read at all by the way.

rcrsn51 · Posted: Mon 31 Jan 2011, 13:28 Post subject:

bertiec · Joined: 01 May 2010 Posts: 11

To playdayz:
My one reference to puppy-522 was a typo. Should have been puppy-520

By the way, thanks to Steve Litt's script, I could do an md5sum of the .iso on the RD-WR
CD disk. Its still the same as the downloaded file.

To rcrsn51:
I'm not understanding you: How do I get to the point of being able mount the hard drive
partition after being bombed out straightaway by that kernel panic - and before even being able to choose between Frugal or Full?

Maybe I should boot under my Slackware or Ubuntu CD just to repartion the hard drive before trying puppy-520 again.

rcrsn51 · Posted: Tue 01 Feb 2011, 07:54 Post subject:

Did you try the one-click installer with the Puppy CD that does boot?

bertiec · Joined: 01 May 2010 Posts: 11

No, rcrsn51, I did not try the one-click installer on my bootable puppy-511 cd.

The main reason I had for upgrading puppy was that I thought it might correct a problem
I was having with my video driver or with my xorg.conf. (You may remember adviising me about it.) Mysteriously, that problem has gone away! - But I decided to upgrade anyway.

Before trying the puppy-520 install I first installed Ubuntu just to get an ext3 formatted hard disk. I'm not sure, but I think I also ran a command to force a Windows MBR onto
the hard disk. This hasn't stopped my puppy-511 cd from booting but it just may have something to do with the kernel panic under puppy-520. - I'm getting that panic even when I just press RETURN in response to the boot prompt, i.e. when I do'nt attempt the one-click hd install

To prove that I do have a Linux-formatted hd, this is the output of 'fdisk -l' commanded on my puppy-511 system:-

Disk /dev/sda: 40.0 GB, 40007761920 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4864 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 4659 37423386 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 4660 4864 1646662+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 4660 4864 1646631 82 Linux swap / Solaris