Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Beholder]

I have puppy set up to boot from a USB disc with the pup001 on the disc also. It goes through the boot process then i get a red message saying that X could not be found probably because usr_cram.fs was not mounted to /usr. i tried mounting it manually but it said that a block device was required. is there a way to get this working? or possibly by using my HD, i'm not too worred about having to have stuff one there ... although it is a WinXP NTFS partition. (Will this work) Thanks

[papaschtroumpf]

I run from USB only (both the boot image and the pup file are on the USB disk) and it works just fine for me.

I booted off the 1.0.3 liveCD, chose the "install to USB key" wizard with all default options. (the drive was already formatted as FAT32, one single partition, so I chose /dev/sda1 when prompted)
I had to run syslinux 3.09 on the key because it wouldn't boot in my work laptop but otherwise it works fine except that it's slow because my current key is only USB 1.1 (1G USB 2.0 on the way).
I made another post using syslinux, but basically I downloaded syslinx in windows, extracted to archive, went to the win32 directory and from a DOS prompt typed: (since my USB drived appeared as drive E
syslinux E:

you can run syslinux from puppy too, I just happened to be in windows at the time.
------------------------------------------------------------------

To put your pup file on an NTFS partition, you need to boot into windows, download the pup0001.zip file and unzip it to C:/
For some reason the pup0001.zip file is not on the iBiblio mirror, but you can get it here: http://mymirrors.homelinux.org/puppy/pup001.zip

you can then boot into puppy and it will fnd the file and use it safely, without having to write to the NTFS partition.

[Flash]

Well done! I'm putting this one in the Beginners sticky post.

[Rich]

[papaschtroumpf]

Puppy runs quite well out of a USB stick, but it can take a while to boot if your stick is only USB 1.1

I would recommend the minimum size to be 128M even though 64M would probably work. You just need space for your data. (a 1G stick currently retails for about $60 in the US, after rebates).

Please note that a lot of high capacity sticks will not work well if used with a USB hub, especially if it's not a self powered hub (one with a power adapter of its own).

If you have a large stick, in addition to the puppy install and its pup0000 file, you could add the following files outside of the pup0000 file so that they can be accessed on any machine, including windows machines, to make sure that you can always come up with a way to boot, even if it means creating a boot diskette on the fly:

* a copy of the rawwrite or rawrite program (or both) so that you can write a boot diskette anywhere

* a copy of the boot diskette image: here. Note that this is a .gz file which you may not be able to read properly from a windows web site, so I would decompress it and simply zip it, since it hard to find a computer that can't handle ZIP fiels nowadays (built in XP for example)
I thought there were 2 different possible boot diskettes, but I can't find 2 of them. If you know of a 2nd one, please post

* a copy of the "blank" puppy file in case you need to install one on a NTFS partition. download it here or here

* a copy of explore2fs. this will let you read files out of your pup0000 file if for whatever reason you just can't boot puppy but still want access to that data. Another way to deal with that problem is to always write your data to /mnt/home which will write "ouside" of pup0000


I am missing one thing that I would like to have: a CD-ROM (ISO) equivalent to the boot diskette that would just boot the computer and run puppy off my USB key, similar to the boot floppy. This is useful for laptops that can't boot from USB but don't have a floppy drive either


EDIT: also I saw in the discussions on wireless and maybe soundcards that puppy has other driver packages that are not on the CD. Maybe it's possible to add those to your USB key so that you can work on even more hardware if you're on the road

[Beholder]

Hmm, well, I'm running from a laptop myself, 256Mb USB pen drive and was hoping to sort this without having to burn the live CD. I downloaded the .iso and took all the files. Downloaded the latest version of syslinux (3.09) because the earlier wouldn't boot on my laptop for some reason (jusst got a black screen and blinking cursor). If possibly i'd prefer to keep all files on the pen drive although i'm not all to worried about using up HD space as I have 80Gb free. The pup100 file created by the first time i booted seems to have filled all remaining free space that was on the USB disk. I think this is why the usr_cram.fs was unable to mount to /usr as there is no free space left on the USB disk. If possible I would like to resize the pup100 so i can do this otherwise i'll stick the file on my HD. Also to note, my syslinux.cfg did not contain the following, I added it in after reading a post here, before this i could not boot at all, i got an error saying could not find linux kernel or something or other:

syslinux.cfg was like this:

default vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 initrd=image.gz
append PSLEEP=25

the pup did not boot like this as it could not find the linux kernel.

made syslinux.cfg like this: (simply by copying what i found on this forum blindly)

default vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 initrd=image.gz
append PSLEEP=25 PHOME=sda1 PFILE=pup100-none-262144 PKEYS=us

I'm guessing the "262144" has something to do with the size so i'm going to quarter it's size after posting this and see how that goes. I look forward to your reply, and i'll post my own results if any. Thanks

[papaschtroumpf]

see this thread: http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?p=4549#4549
I had problems booting my USB puppy off a floppy

[papaschtroumpf]

This is really weird, booting from floppy with puppy on usb drive I am able to boot but not start X. No error message, i just stays there at a blank screen and I think eventually times out, or I can use ALT-F1/F2 to get a console interface.
From there nothing looks amiss, I can do all kind of things from the command line, etc...
Not sure how to troubleshoot it. The /tmp/xerr.txt or whatever it was simply says that it cant' connect to the X server.

[Beholder]

I tried your suggestion of using the live CD as per your previous suggestion to no avail. The USB disk once setup from livepuppy setup menu would not boot giving merely "Boot Failed" I went into windows and ran the syslinux 3.09 on it and got nothing but the blinking cursor, i'm going to try reformat my USB as a HDD that got me somewhere atleast. I cannot try the floppy boot as my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive. (Hardly required when you have a CD/DVD-RW) I'll have a fiddle with various things as it seems to get me the furthest with anything lately. I'll post back if i find anything else.

[Beholder]

Fail, fail, fail. I'm gonna give it a rest for a few days, maybe i'll see it burning on a bush or something and it'll come to me. I'll check back for replies, Thanks again

[Flash]

Just to clear up some uncertainty in my mind, everyone is talking about USB flash drives, not USB disk drives, right?

[papaschtroumpf]

I'm talking about USB flash/key/pen drive, although I'm not sure a USB external drive is any different. I think that they both adhere to the same USB storage specification.

[Flash]

I can't find the post right now, but someone, I think it was Barry, said that he had trouble using a USB hard drive with Puppy. He thought it was because the hard drive was powered by the USB port.

Edit: here's the thread.

[Beholder]

Yeh my question was concerning USB flash memory disks. The pen/key type. Still had no luck but i'll try it again when I get a chance. Don't have the patience right now to keep rebooting from windows etc and waiting for it to load back up everytime i need to fiddle with it. I might even try doing it manually from puppy of if that fails I have a pc with redhat that might help. Thanks

[Ian]

I thought that USB flash/pen drives came preformatted as FAT 16.