How to partition hard drive for Puppy install?
How to partition hard drive for Puppy install?
Since our old computer is back from repair and we have no need of two machines running Win XP I want to do a full hard drive install of puppy that will leave it the only OS on the machine for the time being. Sometime back there was a wiki entry/method that resulted in an install with two partitions - a 1GB swap file and the balance an ext2 main partition with Grub as the bootloader. For some reason I can't find that wiki entry now - can anyone point me at it? Specs on the machine are AMD Athlon XP processor, 80GB hard drive, 736MB RAM. When I do the install I'd like to make allowance for installing another Linux OS later - probably Mandriva. Any ideas or advice on partitioning and/or setup would be welcome.
you have lots of ram, so i would suggest running Puppy in ram as it was intended to run
method 1) put a Puppy cd in the drive and reboot ... Puppy is running in ram as it was intended to run
method 2) copy usr_cram.fs to the hard drive and boot from the cd ... Puppy is now 80% "installed" on the hard drive
method 3) copy vmlinuz, image.gz, and usr_cram.fs to the hard drive ... now Puppy is completely installed on the hard drive (frugal install) ... you can boot from a floppy or a cd
method 4) same as method 3, but install Grub to boot directly from the hard drive ... this is the way i run Puppy, i have never bothered to do an "option 2" install, you would lose many of Puppy's advantages
i would partition your drive with as many ext3 partitions as you like ... probably two or three would be adequate ... you can resize and repartition your drive later with parted or qtparted or gparted anyway
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=2656#2656
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/
some people make a small read-only partition just for the operating system binaries and libraries, using reiserfs because it is (theoretically) slightly faster than ext3 ... i have never bothered to do this ... separating the writable part of the os from the relatively static unchanging part does have advantages (less likely to cause corruption) ... but a Puppy frugal install will also have this advantage
method 1) put a Puppy cd in the drive and reboot ... Puppy is running in ram as it was intended to run
method 2) copy usr_cram.fs to the hard drive and boot from the cd ... Puppy is now 80% "installed" on the hard drive
method 3) copy vmlinuz, image.gz, and usr_cram.fs to the hard drive ... now Puppy is completely installed on the hard drive (frugal install) ... you can boot from a floppy or a cd
method 4) same as method 3, but install Grub to boot directly from the hard drive ... this is the way i run Puppy, i have never bothered to do an "option 2" install, you would lose many of Puppy's advantages
i would partition your drive with as many ext3 partitions as you like ... probably two or three would be adequate ... you can resize and repartition your drive later with parted or qtparted or gparted anyway
http://www.murga.org/~puppy/viewtopic.php?p=2656#2656
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
http://qtparted.sourceforge.net/
some people make a small read-only partition just for the operating system binaries and libraries, using reiserfs because it is (theoretically) slightly faster than ext3 ... i have never bothered to do this ... separating the writable part of the os from the relatively static unchanging part does have advantages (less likely to cause corruption) ... but a Puppy frugal install will also have this advantage
Last edited by GuestToo on Tue 18 Apr 2006, 02:55, edited 1 time in total.
Here are some links to get you started.
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
I hope this helps.
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... ve+install
I hope this helps.
the one you wanted?
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyHardDriveInstall
to keep it simple i would put puppy first (2-5G)then the swap and leave the rest to format later
that way when you add another linux you can use the same swap without it being very far from the os
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyHardDriveInstall
to keep it simple i would put puppy first (2-5G)then the swap and leave the rest to format later
that way when you add another linux you can use the same swap without it being very far from the os
Thanks guys!!
Thank you to all that replied - outcyder THAT was the post I was looking for! About the only change I'm considering making is to set the size of the puppy partition to about 20 to 30GB - I tend to do a lot with music and photo files and that eats up space quite quickly. The remaining space being either unallocated or another ext3 partition for future use with another linux OS - probably Mandriva.
GuestToo-
What I'm hoping to end up with is something like your method four - main reason being to get away from the limitations sizewise of the pup001 save file. Setting this up should be an interesting learning experience.
GuestToo-
What I'm hoping to end up with is something like your method four - main reason being to get away from the limitations sizewise of the pup001 save file. Setting this up should be an interesting learning experience.
what i do is put big files in my other partitions ... like downloads, java, firefox, opera, etc, etc ... that way, my pup001 file doesn't need to be largemain reason being to get away from the limitations sizewise of the pup001 save file
if you have linux partitions (ext3, reiserfs ...) you can simply make a symlink in /root to a directory on your partition, and have a folder in /root that is the size of your partition ... for example, you could have a folder in my-documents called my-stuff, which is a symlink to a folder in an 80 gig partition ... so you would have 80 gigs of space in /root/my-documents/my-stuff ... or just make /root/my-documents a symlink
in any case, it's really easy to arrange things the way you want, and you can later do an option 2 install if you like (individual files in a dedicated partition) ... it should be relatively easy to change things if you later decide to do it differently
Success - well sort of...
Followed the proceedure in this post
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyHardDriveInstall
to wipe, repartition, and install puppy to hard disc - was OK up to final step which is installing GRUB to the MBR. For reasons unknown to this linux newbie GRUB is not installing to the MBR and on boot am recieving an error message about an invalid partition table. Hard disc is set up as follows - /dev/hda1 linux swap 1GB - /dev/hda2 linux ext2 approx 30GB - /dev/hda3 linux ext2 remainder of disc (80GB) according to MUT. Two things - first the swap partition when mounted shows an ntfs file system?
Second when setting up GRUB it presents /dev/hda2 as where it wants to put GRUB and attempts to change it to MBR result in an error message. Suspect that I'm making an error in syntax on the place to put GRUB - anyone care to enlighten this newbie? For the time being I'm using the option to boot from a floppy disc which works OK but would like to get GRUB working so as to be able to boot from the hard disc and get rid of the floppy - thanks in advance for any help or direction.
Alice
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyHardDriveInstall
to wipe, repartition, and install puppy to hard disc - was OK up to final step which is installing GRUB to the MBR. For reasons unknown to this linux newbie GRUB is not installing to the MBR and on boot am recieving an error message about an invalid partition table. Hard disc is set up as follows - /dev/hda1 linux swap 1GB - /dev/hda2 linux ext2 approx 30GB - /dev/hda3 linux ext2 remainder of disc (80GB) according to MUT. Two things - first the swap partition when mounted shows an ntfs file system?
Second when setting up GRUB it presents /dev/hda2 as where it wants to put GRUB and attempts to change it to MBR result in an error message. Suspect that I'm making an error in syntax on the place to put GRUB - anyone care to enlighten this newbie? For the time being I'm using the option to boot from a floppy disc which works OK but would like to get GRUB working so as to be able to boot from the hard disc and get rid of the floppy - thanks in advance for any help or direction.
Alice
slvrldy17,
somethings amiss if you've got a swap partition reading as ntfs!
if you boot from puppy cdrom, open up a console window & type "fdisk /dev/hda" , then "p", to show the partition table, what does it show? does it indicate which is your active boot partition, (with an asterisk under boot)?
if it's showing an ntfs partition, you can change to swap by typing "t", for toggle, then the partition number, then "l" , to list the partition codes, then, in the case of a swap partition, "82".
if you need to alter/set the active partition type "a", then the partition number.
when you're happy with how it's set up type "w", to write changes to disk. if you don't want to alter anything pressing "q" will quit without saving or, if your in the middle of some process, just press control-c.
fdisk only changes the partition flag for a partition to swap. you then need to issue the command "mkswap /dev/hda2", changing hda2 to whatever is your swap partition.
if your installing grub as the last step in the puppy cdrom "install to hard disk" script, i've noticed that sometimes it doesn't install to mbr, however if i take the "simple grub install"
option, and choose install to mbr, that has always worked for me.
when you reboot puppy should detect your swap partition if you type "free" in a console window, this will show you if it's "on". if , for some reason, it's not, you can open up the file
/.etc/rc.d/rc.local in text editor, and add a line saying:
"swapon /dev/hda2"
somethings amiss if you've got a swap partition reading as ntfs!
if you boot from puppy cdrom, open up a console window & type "fdisk /dev/hda" , then "p", to show the partition table, what does it show? does it indicate which is your active boot partition, (with an asterisk under boot)?
if it's showing an ntfs partition, you can change to swap by typing "t", for toggle, then the partition number, then "l" , to list the partition codes, then, in the case of a swap partition, "82".
if you need to alter/set the active partition type "a", then the partition number.
when you're happy with how it's set up type "w", to write changes to disk. if you don't want to alter anything pressing "q" will quit without saving or, if your in the middle of some process, just press control-c.
fdisk only changes the partition flag for a partition to swap. you then need to issue the command "mkswap /dev/hda2", changing hda2 to whatever is your swap partition.
if your installing grub as the last step in the puppy cdrom "install to hard disk" script, i've noticed that sometimes it doesn't install to mbr, however if i take the "simple grub install"
option, and choose install to mbr, that has always worked for me.
when you reboot puppy should detect your swap partition if you type "free" in a console window, this will show you if it's "on". if , for some reason, it's not, you can open up the file
/.etc/rc.d/rc.local in text editor, and add a line saying:
"swapon /dev/hda2"
Making progress...
Thanks for the advice - swap is now active and MUT shows everything to be normal - no more ntfs for hda1. Have puppy installed on hda2 and hda3 is set aside for future use - likely as a home for a Mandriva install. Only thing that I need to change is to get GRUB working - for the time being I'm booting from a floppy disc.
OK - so where do I download the proper version of GRUB to boot puppy from and then install and configure it? Last night was my first time using fdisk and I'm mildly surprised that everything worked as well as it did. Advantage to working with our old computer is that it has an internal floppy drive to boot from and thus any problems with set up are not a crisis situation. Have made considerable use of Partition Magic over the years in Windows but fdisk was new territory for me. When the GRUB install script wouldn't work last night I took the option to make a boot floppy and since hda2 has puppy on it I can boot puppy but the option2 hard drive install script doesn't want to get to the point of installing GRUB to the MBR now - stops at step 5 as it detects the puppy install on hda2. So, anyone care to advise on the next step?
Thanks to all for the help so far.
OK - so where do I download the proper version of GRUB to boot puppy from and then install and configure it? Last night was my first time using fdisk and I'm mildly surprised that everything worked as well as it did. Advantage to working with our old computer is that it has an internal floppy drive to boot from and thus any problems with set up are not a crisis situation. Have made considerable use of Partition Magic over the years in Windows but fdisk was new territory for me. When the GRUB install script wouldn't work last night I took the option to make a boot floppy and since hda2 has puppy on it I can boot puppy but the option2 hard drive install script doesn't want to get to the point of installing GRUB to the MBR now - stops at step 5 as it detects the puppy install on hda2. So, anyone care to advise on the next step?
Thanks to all for the help so far.
what if you boot cd puppy, then format hda2 with "mke2fs /dev/hda2", then run the install puppy to hard disk script, and select install grub to mbr?
alternatively this link is to the grub manual which tells how to install grub to hard disk and, perhaps as a backup, hot to create a grub floppy.
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual ... oot-floppy
alternatively this link is to the grub manual which tells how to install grub to hard disk and, perhaps as a backup, hot to create a grub floppy.
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual ... oot-floppy
Thinking on the same lines....
Muggins,
Was considering much the same solution although a tad more radical - since I've only got about 1 to 2 hours invested in this setup just start over from the begining - should be easier the second time around. I'll try your suggestion first - hopefully I'll get lucky this time. I'll let you know what happens.
Was considering much the same solution although a tad more radical - since I've only got about 1 to 2 hours invested in this setup just start over from the begining - should be easier the second time around. I'll try your suggestion first - hopefully I'll get lucky this time. I'll let you know what happens.
Success!
Houston - Puppy has ignition and liftoff ! This time the option 2 install script worked. I suspect that the problem the first time around was that /dev/hda1 - the swap file - was not active and the installer could not access the MBR. Perhaps as the last entry under "Creating File Systems" in the wiki instructions in this entry
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyHardDriveInstall should be updated to add a note to make sure the swap file is on and active before running the option 2 install. Before closing the console type "swapon /dev/hda1" assuming that hda1 is the swap file. It's time for this somewhat sleep deprived lady to go to work - see y'all later.
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/PuppyHardDriveInstall should be updated to add a note to make sure the swap file is on and active before running the option 2 install. Before closing the console type "swapon /dev/hda1" assuming that hda1 is the swap file. It's time for this somewhat sleep deprived lady to go to work - see y'all later.
HDD Install - a word of caution
I went through all the above instructions FIVE times before I succeeded.
The last attempt was going to be just that but this time I didn't click any of the "OK" tabs immediately. I waited until whatever procedure was active until I thought was completed.
It seems that hitting the OK too soon(?) terminates the task without warning.
Also. grub menu.list has an option to boot into hda1, my swap partition. I haven't tried it but I guess chaos would result.
Thanks for all the tips, now I am a happy puppy.
The last attempt was going to be just that but this time I didn't click any of the "OK" tabs immediately. I waited until whatever procedure was active until I thought was completed.
It seems that hitting the OK too soon(?) terminates the task without warning.
Also. grub menu.list has an option to boot into hda1, my swap partition. I haven't tried it but I guess chaos would result.
Thanks for all the tips, now I am a happy puppy.