Old Laptop live-boot success from hard disk

[Delboy]

Hello Puppians,
(Digital Hinote 40MB ram, 166mhz, 1.3MB hard disk, 12.5" TFT, NO CDrom, no battery, internal floppy drive working)
I gave up trying to boot from external CDrom with my ancient laptop long ago. Last night I successfully live-booted up Puppy for the first time from the hard disk using 'Wakepup' floppy (to be hard disk installed later). This works where 'boot2pup' floppy failed:
(NO Windows installed).
1) Refomatted drive with Win98 start-up floppy, deleted old partitions etc. using fdisk.
2) Installed MS Dos 6.0 (unlike Damnsmall linux, Puppy needs some MS Dos installed to boot). Defragged.
3) Used downloaded 'Fips.exe' on floppy to split single partition into first and second MsDos partitions.
4) Used Dos 'fdisk' to delete second 'Dos' partition to leave free space
5) Used linux 'cfdisk' on floppy to format free space into three linux partitions including one at 256MB in type'83' swap format, to leave
Hda 1 for MS Dos, Hda2 linux swap, Hda3 main Linux partition and small HDa4 for storage.
6) I copied Puppy v.1.7 files VMLINUZ, IMAGE.GZ, USR_CRAM.FS onto top of hard disk Dos partition No. 1 by external paralell port connected CDRom drive.
7) I created the recommended PUPXIDE file in the top of the Dos partition by using the C:\'Edit' command in Dos. This opens up the Dos text editor where, like 'Notepad', you can open a new file and instantly save it as 'pupxide' in C:\ without a .txt extension. Exit. (I did this as I simply could not copy this file made in another machine via floppy drive).
This left the four files at the top of C:\ directory.
9) Rebooted with 'Wakepup' floppy boot disk. Selected option (1) at first menu for IDE internal hard drive.
10) Selected option 3) at second menu for user selection of pupxxx file location and name. Then, when requested, chose Hda1 for location and pup001 for name then..... Bingo, it worked!
11) Hard disk installed in Hda3 tonight I hope.

I have spent days banging my head surfing the forum to get this laptop working for my son and, while the info has been good, the obvious missing piece of the puzzle was not apparent: MsDos in some form is needed in C:\. I have installed Vector, Deli and Damnsmall linux before on this machine without Dos or Windows and I made the mistake of assuming Puppy would work like this too. DOH! Bravo to the Puppy community! The distro I have observed from a distance over the last couple of years has become ever more incredible. I am going to try this route on my Portege 3440CT next.

[Sinphaltimus]

I tried getting puppy on an old toshiba satallite Pro 420CDS - 40MBs ram, Pentium 100mhz 1GB HDD (I upgraded it was originally 850mbs).

had the same cd-rom boot issue, it simply didn't support it. I used the boot2pup floppy but it kept crashing in the middle of the live CD boot. I believe it had to do with puppy trying to create a 256MB ram disk.

DSL (Damn Small Linux) - not my preffered OS over Puppy but only needed a 30MB ram disk to get the DSL live CD booted. I was able to get that installed, working and even on the internet with an old 10/100 pcmcia nic.

I now leave on my bar at home as a guest laptop for friends and family to get on the internet and do internet things like email, chat, etc...

Bugger was headed for the trash otherwise, but I would love to get puppy on it. I see you only have 40MBs ram so I will try and follow your steps.

[Delboy]

I assume that, although my boot process stated that it couldn't use my hda2 linux swap partition (..."failed arguement"...."waiting sixty seconds"), it continued anyway although only having 40MB physical ram. From the gui, MUT doesn't recognise the linux swap partition either. Unsurprisingly, it is pretty slow at the moment. I expect this to improve when I hard disk install when the swap should be recognised.
Try the latest Wakepup floppy, but try and get a decent swapfile on your
dos partition first. If you have DSL linux running, use the menus to get to the "Create Dos swapfile" utility - make it at least 128MB. (Or search this forum to set one up from the command line). This should help if you want to try puppy afterwards. You may need to rename it as 'pup.swp' instead of 'knoppix.swp' for the puppy boot to recognise it - use the 'ren' command in Dos.
C:\ren knoppix.swp pup.swp (or something like it)

[Sinphaltimus followup]

Thanks for these tips. I am most likely going to mess with this over the weekend.

However, I am guessing here due to your previous post, I will need a dos partition regardless and the dos swap file created. I didn't need to do any of that with the DSL install. I like Puppy a lot more than DSL and will certainly try everything I can to get it up and running on this old laptop. If I fail, I'll just stick with the DSL on this one only.

So much to do..

1. Try to upgrade existing puppy laptop installation with configuration on my USB boot puppy install.
2. Try to get puppy install on old toshiba laptop.
3. Try to get my Bootable USB puppy installation to also work with QEMU so I can either boot from it, bott it in windows qemu or boot in linux QEMU.

The best part of all this, it's so much fun and such a great learning experience. I miss the days when computing was fun, and now their back! LOL. Thanks again, I'll report back on all my efforts.