Need a Boot Floppy

[gerry]

Anyone know of a boot floppy (software) that actually works?? I need one so that I can boot my old machine from a USB stick. I've tried several boot floppies, but none of them worked. Anyone know of one that they've actually, personally, used with success?

gerry

[Sylvander]

I used to routinely use the WakePup2 bootable floppy bye me here, to boot a Puppy [4.2.1?] I'd installed to a FAT [32?] partition on a 1GB Flash Drive.

It ALWAYS worked on my own old [2001?, now 2003] PC hardware, yet when I tried it on a neighbors' PC it didn't work.
I never did find out why.

[chrome307]

Have you tried Plop Boot Manager?

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#screenshots

[Bernie_by_the_Sea]

Anyone know of a boot floppy (software) that actually works?? I need one so that I can boot my old machine from a USB stick. I've tried several boot floppies, but none of them worked. Anyone know of one that they've actually, personally, used with success?

I occasionally use a floppy to boot my seven-month-old desktop that has a floppy disk drive. This floppy has grub4dos that boots not only Wary and Lucid but also Knoppix, XP, Mepis and Debian.

I have an 8GB USB stick that boots up with Wary. I have another 4GB stick that dual boots Wary or DSL.

I also have two floppies with GAG and BootItNG! that can boot anything bootable on any partition. And finally I have an XP boot floppy.

What is it, precisely, that you want to do? A floppy boot and a USB boot are not exactly the same. It's much easier to program a floppy than it is to program a pendrive. Do you want to boot Puppy located on a USB stick from a floppy drive? Or do you just want to boot from the USB stick?

[gerry]

Well, I'd like to boot from the USB stick, but the bios does not recognise such things. So I was aiming to boot a Puppy installed on a USB stick, by using a bootfloppy.

I did try Plop, but could not get it to work. If people have had success, I could give it another go.

gerry

[rcrsn51]

Does this machine boot from a CD? If so, read here.

[RetroTechGuy]

Anyone know of a boot floppy (software) that actually works?? I need one so that I can boot my old machine from a USB stick. I've tried several boot floppies, but none of them worked. Anyone know of one that they've actually, personally, used with success?

gerry

http://www.toms.net/rb/

But it will be easier if you can boot a CD (as Tom's will be a command line interface)

[Bernie_by_the_Sea]

If your machine doesn’t boot from a CD, then I think my next step would be grub4dos. Have you tried it?

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=61348

If you don’t have a working Puppy, then you can use the Windows version of grub4dos and wingrub.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos/

[gerry]

Yes, the machine will boot from cd, in fact usually does. But today I found that I have run out of cds, and can't go to the shop, but I do have floppies and usb sticks. I just wanted to get going with what I have in the drawer- plus, of course, if it works, I could save money by not needing to buy cds.

Tomorrow will have to do....

gerry

[bigpup]

menu->setup->Wakepup create boot floppy

[gerry]

@bigpup- I'm using Wary 5.1.1 at the moment. Doing as you suggest gets a little panel that says Wakepup2 not installed, use package manager to install it (or words to that effect). Go to Package manager, check the download sites, and it seems to be not available on any. This was of course what I did before asking for help.

I'll give it another go before I go to bed....

gerry

[gerry]

OK, people- I've installed it from the Puppy 4 repo, using Ibiblio. Leave to play with it........

thanks, gerry

[gerry]

I installed spup-099 to a usb stick, using"Bootflash- Install Puppy to USB". Tried it on my netbook, which will boot from usb, and it worked.

Created a Wakepup2 floppy. Plugged usb stick into old computer, put floppy into drive, and switched on. Wakepup2 woke up, and presented me with six options. None of them worked (didn't try the parallel port ones). All went through various activities, but always ended with some sort of error message, such as "Device not found", or "Adapter not present".

Give in. Back to burning cd's, now that I have replenished my stock.

gerry

[philou]

I tried to use Wakepup2 for booting an old PC (Compaq Deskpro PII 350 MHz without CD Rom device) with all my 6 different USB Flash :

Memory Corp InnoDisk DU-CARD 128MB
Sandisk Cruzer Micro 256MB
Generic USB Flash Disk PQI Cool Drive 2GB
Generic Storage Device Sandisk SD CARD 2GB
Kingston Data Traveller 8GB
Intenso Business 8GB

Only one of these 6 USB Flash has given successful results .
I have searched everywhere on the Web for a solution and I didn't find any good one. Finally, I decided to search by myself
and I found a solution which gave successful result for every 6 USB Flash .
I modified the config.sys file in Wakepup2 , removing either the line

device=A:\driver\usb\USBASPI.SYS /v

or the line

device=A:\driver\usb\aspiuhci.sys /int /all

I have now one Wakepup2 for a part of the 6 USB Flash and another Wakepup2 for another part of the 6 USB Flash ,
some USB Flash belonging to both parts .
I suppose there are some incompatibilities between USBASPI.SYS and aspiuhci.sys .
Along my experiments , I noticed also , for USB Flash , the mandatoriness of line

device=A:\driver\ASPIDISK.SYS

in both cases .

==============================================

Later , I tried to use the new Wakepup2 V2 20070919. None of my 6 USB Flash has given successful result .
Remembering my experience about the old Wakepup2 , I found a correction for config.sys file of the new Wakepup2 : the line

18?!device=driver\ASPIDISK.SYS

must be executed even for cases 5 and 6 .
So , for good result , this line must be

1568?!device=A:\driver\ASPIDISK.SYS

I didn't test other cases than cases 5 and 6 .

==============================================

Recently, I tested Wakepup2 with 2 other old PCs (with same USB1 slots).
I had problem using aspiuhci.sys , but problem has disappeared when I have disconnected USB mouse for boot sequence .

==============================================


Hope all these informations can help some people .

[MinHundHettePerro]

I've found the plop boot manager to be a good tool to boot from USB on non-boot-from-USB-BIOSes.
It can be used in a variety of ways. I just use it for booting USB devices; on a GRUB floppy one of the entries in menu.lst goes like

Code: Select all

 title boot plpbt on floppy
 root (fd0)
 kernel /plpbt-5.0.12/plpbt.bin

A very nifty tool .....
Hth /MHHP

[cthisbear]

philou :

Thanks for your testing, and welcome here to the Puppy forum.

Chris.