XP & Puppy dual boot from usb or SD without menu.lst
Posted: Sun 21 Oct 2012, 19:06
.
Do you have a netbook or laptop with an inbuilt HDD installation of Windows XP? Would you like to be able to choose whether to boot into XP, or into Puppy, without making any changes to the HDD at all?
You can do this by setting up a usb stick to control the booting, and the original setting up of this stick can even be done on a completely different machine (or even using a live Puppy CD), so that you do not risk your XP installation at all.
ETP has developed a way to achieve this here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=79955
and focuses on using XP to do the preparation of the usb stick that handles the dual boot. However, I really wanted to prepare the dualboot stick using only a Puppy environment, so this method is a result of my trial and error following ETPs method and the wiki tutorials he linked to.
Stick preparation only takes five minutes - the longest part is reading my blurb.
This procedure uses a running Puppy installation to create a usb stick or SD card which is capable of dualbooting a PC (or netbook) from it’s inbuilt HDD Win XP installation, or from the frugal puppy on the stick/SD. It does not alter the XP installation in any way. It does not add anything to c:/ drive or modfiy the boot sector on the HDD at all. This method does not require a menu.lst. The boot configuration is kept inside the syslinux.cfg file.
*** Note 1 *** This method relies on the use of syslinux 4.04. These specific files have been created by ETP for use with 4.04 and it is known that they will not work with other versions of syslinux, so the usb stick needs to be prepared following the instructions laid out below. I have made a small change to ETP’s original syslinux.cfg file in order to remove one parameter that specified sdb1 as the .sfs location - I suffered a kernel panic if this parameter failed to match the actual location given to the usb stick at boot time, so I removed it as suggested on ETP’s thread.
*** Note 2 *** I am not an expert at these things, so I have simply recorded the steps in the way that gave me reliability and reproducibility. I am sure there are more succint ways of going about it.
NOTE: ALL DATA ON THE USB STICK OR SD CARD WILL BE LOST!!
1) Obtain a suitable usb stick (or SD card) which contains no important data. I trialled this with a 4GB usb stick and a 2GB SD card. (I am planning on getting a Lexar Echo ZX or Sandisk Cruzer “Fit
Do you have a netbook or laptop with an inbuilt HDD installation of Windows XP? Would you like to be able to choose whether to boot into XP, or into Puppy, without making any changes to the HDD at all?
You can do this by setting up a usb stick to control the booting, and the original setting up of this stick can even be done on a completely different machine (or even using a live Puppy CD), so that you do not risk your XP installation at all.
ETP has developed a way to achieve this here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=79955
and focuses on using XP to do the preparation of the usb stick that handles the dual boot. However, I really wanted to prepare the dualboot stick using only a Puppy environment, so this method is a result of my trial and error following ETPs method and the wiki tutorials he linked to.
Stick preparation only takes five minutes - the longest part is reading my blurb.
This procedure uses a running Puppy installation to create a usb stick or SD card which is capable of dualbooting a PC (or netbook) from it’s inbuilt HDD Win XP installation, or from the frugal puppy on the stick/SD. It does not alter the XP installation in any way. It does not add anything to c:/ drive or modfiy the boot sector on the HDD at all. This method does not require a menu.lst. The boot configuration is kept inside the syslinux.cfg file.
*** Note 1 *** This method relies on the use of syslinux 4.04. These specific files have been created by ETP for use with 4.04 and it is known that they will not work with other versions of syslinux, so the usb stick needs to be prepared following the instructions laid out below. I have made a small change to ETP’s original syslinux.cfg file in order to remove one parameter that specified sdb1 as the .sfs location - I suffered a kernel panic if this parameter failed to match the actual location given to the usb stick at boot time, so I removed it as suggested on ETP’s thread.
*** Note 2 *** I am not an expert at these things, so I have simply recorded the steps in the way that gave me reliability and reproducibility. I am sure there are more succint ways of going about it.
NOTE: ALL DATA ON THE USB STICK OR SD CARD WILL BE LOST!!
1) Obtain a suitable usb stick (or SD card) which contains no important data. I trialled this with a 4GB usb stick and a 2GB SD card. (I am planning on getting a Lexar Echo ZX or Sandisk Cruzer “Fit