SOLVED: Any way NOT to load Puppy in RAM at boot ??

[GeexBoxer]

It looks like if Puppy realizes you use an internal harddrive and that you have more than 280MB of ram, then it decides to ignore your wishes and copy into ram anyways.

If you really don't want it to, you could edit the initrd.gz file to adjust it.
I haven't tested this myself though, so there might be another line causing problems too. So let me know if it doesn't work and I'll look deeper.

First of all, thank you for writing very detailed instructions. I did what you told me to but puppy still copies to ram. btw I didn't create a pup_save file yet. could that be a problem? or maybe I should add pfix=noramsfs?

[Pizzasgood]

Yeah, I think that the lack of a pup_save.2fs file might be the problem. I'm saying that from foggy memory, without looking at the code. There are a number of exemptions scattered around, and one of them had to do with the first boot.

I'll look into it tomorrow evening and try to get it working on my end.

It definitely isn't pfix=noramsfs. I just checked (using grep) and the string 'noramsfs' doesn't occur at all in the init script.

[GeexBoxer]

You are right Pizzasgood. It was the lack of pup_save file and now it is working. Thank you for your help, I appreciate it.

So the rough procedure was
1) edit initrd.gz file
2) adding "pfix=noram" to menu.1st file at the end of the kernel
3) make sure pup_save file exists.