(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

@watchdog: My only experience with casper-rw is with a partition, not a file. But the file may have specific ownership/permissions that changed when you copied it to your hard drive. That might cause it to fail.

These are my findings. It's not a permissions' problem. I think it's a bug (seeemingly already reported) of ubuntu. Ubuntu does not like a casper-rw file in hd. My hd is ext4 formatted. According to:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LiveCD/Persistence

a loopback file as casper-rw can be created but I have found you have to copy it on a usb-stick as an alternative of saving in partition. The casper-rw file created by unetbootin is ext2 formatted inside and can be mounted by:
You can copy as you want the casper-rw file of your install but you have to put it in a usb-stick to get recognized. I used a fat32 formatted usb-stick.

ISObooter is an easy way to run Puppy and other Linuxes from USB. But if you only have a Windows machine and no optical drive to make a Puppy boot disc, how do you get started?

This little package lets you make an ISObooter flash drive from Windows. It only boots one Linux. But if you want to multi-boot, you can use the regular ISObooter once you have Puppy running. Some notes before you start:

a. You need a clean FAT32 formatted flash drive.
b. You need WinXP or newer.
c. Your BIOS must be able to boot off USB devices.

1. Copy the zip file isobooter-win.zip to a temporary location and unpack it.
2a. In XP, double-click on grubinst_gui.exe.
2b. In Win7, right-click and choose Run as Administator.
3. Click on Disk > Refresh
4. Select your USB drive from the drop-down list. You can probably identify it by its size. If you are not sure, STOP NOW.
5. Select Part List > Refresh > Whole disk (MBR)
6. Click Install
7. Copy the files grldr, menu.lst and isobooter onto the USB drive.
8. Copy a Linux ISO onto the USB drive.
9. Rename the ISO file as "linux.iso".
10. There should now be four files on the USB drive - grldr, menu.lst, isobooter and linux.iso.
11. Unmount the USB drive and reboot.

Hi, Roc.

You may not remember me, but I was on this thread last March trying to use isobooter to install Puppeee 4.4 on a pendrive, unsuccessfully. I gave up, but eventually did get Puppeee 4.4 installed another way.

I'd still like to make isobooter work for me so I could try out other versions of Puppy, and in case some day I need to re-install Puppeee 4.4. I see that both the Windows and Linux versions of isobooter have been updated since March. Do you think they've changed enough so they might work for me now?

Sorry if this sounds like a silly question, but I don't have much time for experimenting, due to my medical issues.

Thanks once again for all your help.

Cheers!

Mike7

Hi @Rcrsn51 and everyone.

This is a very good product as it makes simple a boot process that merely requires adding an ISO to a USB and booting. It started as a Linux-USB solution and NOW, has been expanded to be a Windows-USB solution for initial setup and use. But, I have a question of ISObooter.

Question

• Can this process be done using a DVD which embraces the ISO booting process?

Seems that with DVDs/Blu-Ray disc provides both the storage and options to offer an ISO boot process which initiates from these disc as well. But, I must assume that there is some known restrictions in doing so and am wondering what they are.;

Thanks in advance

isobooter ideas should work on bluray and I have been reviewing booters that can allow multisession additions. IE can add more iso files and update config txt AFTER FIRST BURN to make this very useful.
So far syslinux family can not read config txt past first session. So it is out.

Reviewing a grub only methods this week as a project to iso-fy the new full install only Quirky6s. I had done a reverse from full install in early days of puppy and Grub worked great. It did not care if it was a hard drive or a hard drive image file on a DVD.

Grub4Dos does not function as cleanly when used outside of an actual hardware layer.

rcrsn51-

I started a post above with "Hi, Roc". I may have gotten your name confused with someone else's. If that's the case, I apologize.

I also apologize for not seeing through the Isobooter project in March. I really do have some serious chronic health issues that prevent me from paying attention to my computer all the time. But I am going to try again. I promise.

Cheers.

Mike

Looks good.
I will try that.

neerajkolte wrote:Looks good. I will try that.

With all due respect, instead of posting a message about what you plan to do, try it first and post a message about how it worked.

rcrsn51 wrote:With all due respect, instead of posting a message about what you plan to do, try it first and post a message about how it worked.

Sorry if I have offended you. I currently don't have usb drive laying around. So I put that message so I could easily find the post later by clicking "view your posts" (Kind of bookmarking it, as I tend to forget sometimes).
I have only one 1gb usb drive that I have made multi ISO boot using Easy2boot.
I will try your tool and report back.
Thanks.

Hi rcrsn51,

I didn't get my hand on spare USB stick. So I used Virtual method. (Thanks @gcmartin for suggesting that)

I created 8Gb virtual disk and booted as Fatdog guest in Fatdog host using KVM-Qemu.
Formatted Virtual disk to Fat32 gave Boot flag to it.
Copied all my ISOs to it.
Namely Ubuntu 13.10 64 bit, Mint 17 rc 64bit, Compizpup, Lxpup, Debiandog, Fatdog64, Lighthouse64, Precise 5.7.1, Puppy Arcade, Slacko64.
Ran isobooter script.
Then shutdown my Guest Fatdog. And used that Virtualdisk to boot in Qemu.

Every ISO boots well.

I forgot to add Win7 iso, I will also try that next.

Thanks

- Neeraj

There's a link in the first post that doesn't work

grub-1.98-i486.pet

___________________________________________

don570 wrote:There's a link in the first post that doesn't work.

Thanks. Luckily, I still had a copy and uploaded it to datafilehost.com.

The Ubuntu Trusty Tahr ISO won't run properly on a 500MB machine.
Just too slow but on a 1.5 GB machine , it was fast.

All I had to do was make a Fat32 partition that had the boot flag.
EDIT: boot flag doesn't need to be set since grub4dos finds the partition
Drag ubuntu.iso to this partition

Add lines to menu.lst

Then boot up.
______________________________________________
_______________________________________________

hi, rcrsn51

your steps say to run isobooter twice, before and after adding the iso's.

Is that still necessary? i've noticed that with some puppies at least, it works running it just once (after adding iso).

thx!

hi

cannot boot pclinuxos64-mate-2014.12.iso

retracing my steps:

- boot into lxpuptahr without any usb drives inserted.
- insert 8 gb sandisk cruzer.
- launch gparted.
- delete all partitions on cruzer.
- create one full-drive fat32 partition.
- mount the new partition in pcmanfm.
- copy isobooter to the partition.
- execute isobooter. say yes to everything.
- copy "pclinuxos64-mate-2014.12.iso" to the partition.
- execute isobooter again. say yes to everything.
- unmount the partition.
- reboot into the usb drive.
- pick "pclinuxos64-mate-2014.12.iso" from the isobooter menu.
- pick "live cd" from the boot menu.
- see a "PCLinuxOS" splash screen and spinner.
- press "esc" key and see nothing but blinking underscore behind splash screen.
- press "esc" key again, return to splash screen.
- OS never boots.

thx!

johnywhy wrote:- pick "live cd" from the boot menu.
- see a "PCLinuxOS" splash screen and spinner.

I duplicated your steps. Underneath the spinner was the message "Booting the system". I waited 90 seconds. It booted.

This was with pclinuxos-mate-2014.12.iso.

Do you have a different machine on which to test this?

i just duplicated these steps with tahrpupNOP and a different flash drive. This time, included a 1 GB unused partition at the end of the drive, since you mention in the OP to do that with multi-partition drives (which this isn't, but just in case isobooter needs it).

Succeeded.

Now going to try with PCLinuxOS non-64, same drive/process.

No other machines available.

johnywhy wrote:duplicated these steps with tahrpupNOP ... Succeeded. Now going to try with PCLinuxOS non-64, same drive/process.

PCLinuxOS non-64 failed. Same result as 64. Does not say underneath the spinner "Booting the system". I waited 5 minutes.

Seems either an issue with the iso's, or my hardware, or my bios. I did an MD5 check on my iso's, passed.

here's a pic of what i see when i pick any of the 'no-splash' options. Since i'm seeing the same thing with all distros i tried, seems maybe the problem is not the distro.

someone on pclinuxos advises:

Before choosing a boot option, press the down arrow key to stop the timer. Select the no splash second boot option using the arrow keys, then type fromusb (all one word) at the end of the boot stanza shown, and only then press the Enter key. With the fromusb parameter, it should find the loop image and be able to mount it.

The USB is booting, but when the kernel loads the modules from the initrd it cannot see the partition on which livecd.sqfs resides. This is usually a BIOS setting - not the one about boot devices, but one about how USB-connected drives are to be interpreted. It won't be in the BIOS's boot menu. It'll be in a section entitled something like "Hardware Settings" or "Chipset configuration" or "Devices" etc.

An alternative workaround would be to copy the livecd.sqfs file from the USB stick to one of the partitions which is searched, provided it's got enough free space to store it, and it's not the partition you intend to install to
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.ph ... 56.20;wap2

i'll try it

johnywhy wrote:

An alternative workaround would be to copy the livecd.sqfs file from the USB stick to one of the partitions which is searched, provided it's got enough free space to store it, and it's not the partition you intend to install to
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.ph ... 56.20;wap2

i'll try it

Solved. Booted successfully. The fix is copying the .sfs file from the iso onto the hard drive.

Then, the boot process finds and mounts it.

Not a total solution, of course, since it requires putting a file on the hard drive-- the goal is booting a live USB without touching the hard drive.

Out of curiosity, i move the sfs from the hard drive to the usb flash drive, but the boot process did not find the sfs if stored on the flash drive. Too bad!

Supposedly a BIOS setting should enable the booter to read the disk image off the USB ISO file, instead of needing to put the squash on the hard disk. I cannot figure out what BIOS setting is needed. Here are some shots of my BIOS.The images are displayed here in reverse order.