What have I done to my Puppy?

Booting, installing, newbie
Post Reply
Message
Author
schnahz
Posts: 38
Joined: Thu 18 Feb 2010, 22:41
Location: Wilmington, Delaware,U.S.A.

What have I done to my Puppy?

#1 Post by schnahz »

I was ripping from a cd when my ram space indicator became completely red [ I have maybe 400MB ] Then it got some thin horizontal lines in it. Puppy kept ripping but when it was done ripping i lost X and now my live CD wont boot and I get messages such as loading isolinux; Disk error 80, AX = 4200, drive9F

I would appreciate someone explaining what I did and what I should do next time.

Thanks,
Schnahz

p310don
Posts: 1492
Joined: Tue 19 May 2009, 23:11
Location: Brisbane, Australia

#2 Post by p310don »

sounds like it was your pupsave indicator, rather than ram, perhaps.


Do you have a save file?

It sounds like you ripped the CD into your save file, which will fill it up fast. Try entering

Code: Select all

puppy pfix=ram
at the live cd boot splash, and then finding your save file and delete the partially ripped CD files.

In future, make sure it rips to /mnt/home or somewhere similar outside of the save file.

schnahz
Posts: 38
Joined: Thu 18 Feb 2010, 22:41
Location: Wilmington, Delaware,U.S.A.

#3 Post by schnahz »

thanks p31don,
Now I understand that the indicator in the system tray is telling me how much of my pupsave file has been used. If I want to check RAM I can I can go a terminal and type free.What happens if I ask the pupsave file to save more information than it can hold [as I did] Does it ruin the live CD and/or the computer? [ my hp pavilion ze with 514 MB of memory won't boot anymore.]

thanks, Schnahz

p310don
Posts: 1492
Joined: Tue 19 May 2009, 23:11
Location: Brisbane, Australia

#4 Post by p310don »

What happens if I ask the pupsave file to save more information than it can hold
You can't do that. Think of the save file as kind of like another hard drive. You can only put so much into it. If yours is 512meg, that's all you can put in, bearing in mind it already has a bunch of stuff in it anyway.

The LiveCD certainly won't be ruined, nor will the computer, you just need to learn how to save stuff outside of the save file. If you boot to pfix=ram as suggested previously you should be able to delete the files and recover your previous save file. Or, from pfix=ram (Live cd no save file) state, you can create a new save file.

You can take two routes, you can make your save file bigger to accommodate whatever you want to put in it, or use the rest of the hard disk drive for storage. The drive can be found at /mnt/home which is like c:\ in windows systems.

I do a bit of both, with a 1+gig save file, and then save almost everything to /mnt/home.

schnahz
Posts: 38
Joined: Thu 18 Feb 2010, 22:41
Location: Wilmington, Delaware,U.S.A.

#5 Post by schnahz »

thanks p310don,
It seems my optical drive has failed. I could not get to the puppy flash screen to try the puppy pfix=ram. I found a post entitled "puppy won't boot from cd" and the responders mentioned that you should make sure the cd rom drive was working and sure enough when i tried to play a cd in mine i got silence. I'm hoping I can still get my Think Pad 390x with 196 Mb of RAM to boot from a flash drive.

Schnahz

User avatar
Flash
Official Dog Handler
Posts: 13071
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 16:04
Location: Arizona USA

#6 Post by Flash »

Schnahz, from what you've said so far, it's not a sure thing that your CD drive has failed. What exactly happens when you try to boot your CD? Can you hear the drive spin up? Does a light on the drive come on, indicating something is going on? Do you get any error messages on the screen? What do they say? How did you try to play an audio CD in that drive?

schnahz
Posts: 38
Joined: Thu 18 Feb 2010, 22:41
Location: Wilmington, Delaware,U.S.A.

#7 Post by schnahz »

Hi Flash,
I just put Barebones Puppy 2.01 in the optical drive/cd rom drive and there was a whir noise and the cd rom light is blinking but I am stuck at the IBM Think Pad splash screen. I've been at this point for more than 10 minutes. It says press F1 to enter the BIOS setup utility so I'll go through that just to see what happens. The splash screen says Think Pad IBM BIOS Setup Utlility but now I'm stuck at this point for 5 minutes. I'll press enter just to see what will happen.Nothing,it just seems frozen. I'll repeat the process - wow it booted up and I've got my puppy desktop.I tried to poweroff but that seems frozen. Can't get the cursor to move. I'll try to exit X with ctrl alt backspace. Nothing. OK I'll pull the plug - It's been frozen 9 minutes.I boot it up and Windows 2000 boots [ I tried playing the cd in Windows Media player and when it did not play i thought the cd rom was not working.] I shut down Windows and reboot. Windows is booting again even though I set the BIOS so that the hard drive is the last place to look for an operating system.

thanks, Schnahz

User avatar
Flash
Official Dog Handler
Posts: 13071
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 16:04
Location: Arizona USA

#8 Post by Flash »

Well I don't know what's wrong, but if there's nothing in the CD drive, the computer will boot whatever it finds on the hard disk. In this case, Windows.
I guess if an audio CD won't play, then maybe there is something wrong with the CD drive. I'm assuming that it used to play audio CDs. Is that right?

schnahz
Posts: 38
Joined: Thu 18 Feb 2010, 22:41
Location: Wilmington, Delaware,U.S.A.

#9 Post by schnahz »

I can't say for sure that it ever did play cd's but it did boot puppy 15 or so times pretty consistently until now.

schnahz
Posts: 38
Joined: Thu 18 Feb 2010, 22:41
Location: Wilmington, Delaware,U.S.A.

#10 Post by schnahz »

I kept trying and now it is booting puppy and I'm at the puppy desktop. I tried to power off and it froze. Can't move the cursor. I'll leave it overnight to see if it shuts down.

musher0
Posts: 14629
Joined: Mon 05 Jan 2009, 00:54
Location: Gatineau (Qc), Canada

#11 Post by musher0 »

Sorry, bad joke...
Last edited by musher0 on Wed 06 Feb 2013, 16:43, edited 1 time in total.
musher0
~~~~~~~~~~
"You want it darker? We kill the flame." (L. Cohen)

User avatar
Flash
Official Dog Handler
Posts: 13071
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 16:04
Location: Arizona USA

#12 Post by Flash »

Schnahz, how do you feel about opening the laptop in order to blow out the dust and reseat the RAM? (Remove the RAM sticks and then put them back.) Is that something you'd feel comfortable about doing?

schnahz
Posts: 38
Joined: Thu 18 Feb 2010, 22:41
Location: Wilmington, Delaware,U.S.A.

#13 Post by schnahz »

Hi Flash,
Thanks for your suggestion. I think it is a great idea, after all the whole idea is to learn something. I'll look it over tonite and be ready for your go ahead.

Last nite it was hung up but by morning it had shut down. I was able to run puppy in pfix=ram as p310don suggested and removed some audio files. The think pad boots to puppy 4.1 half the time and Windows 2000 the other half of the time. I got some error messages such as:

isolinux: Disk error 01, AX=3218,Drive 9F

Disk error 01,AV= 4210, Drive 9F

User avatar
steevieb
Posts: 289
Joined: Sun 31 Dec 2006, 00:11
Location: Poole, Dorset. UK

#14 Post by steevieb »

Also if you have the chance, check the cables. May be a loose connection.
Although I had similar error messages once before, and it was the cd drive that had failed.

schnahz
Posts: 38
Joined: Thu 18 Feb 2010, 22:41
Location: Wilmington, Delaware,U.S.A.

#15 Post by schnahz »

I found a compartment on the back side of the think pad laptop which i think would let me reseat the ram as Flash suggested but rightly or wrongly i started to worry that if my optical drve/ cddrive did fail i might not be able to communicate with the computer at all since i had never been able to get the thinkpad to boot from a usb drive. But if I used Gparted to format my hard drive to ext3 then i could install puppy 4.1 and all would be well. The only problem i had was that i could not get Gparted to reformat the hard drive because i was using it. Once i rebooted using puppy=pfixram everything went smoothly until at the very end i was supposed to type some instructions and put these instructions in a specific file. For some reason i thought it would be good to copy these instructions onto a piece of paper and while i was doing that the instructions disappeared and so the instructions never got placed where they were supposed to be which is why i was not surprised when i got this message when i tried to boot.: "error loading operating system." So i'm back to the optical drive,puppy 5.25 won't work, puppy 4.1 won't work,but barebones puppy 2.01 Does work except that the cursor freezes quite a bit. Is there any other option to pulling the plug when that happens?

schnahz
Posts: 38
Joined: Thu 18 Feb 2010, 22:41
Location: Wilmington, Delaware,U.S.A.

#16 Post by schnahz »

here is a discussion of freeze ups in 4.0 http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 50db1260b7

schnahz

Post Reply