Played with partitioning, now Puppy won't boot from USB

Booting, installing, newbie
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3lo
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat 18 Nov 2006, 18:23

Played with partitioning, now Puppy won't boot from USB

#1 Post by 3lo »

hi everyone, i have an old laptop Dell inspiron 3000, no cdrom, but have the usb. Tried puppy linux, booting from usb with the help of floppy. Everything worked fine until...
i started playing with partitions.
I started formating them and changing types and so on. Well i am not an expert on partitoning but anyway, i read somewhere about mbr, could i possibly erased it?
Back to my problem, now i cant even start puppy from usb. it gives me error "C: Dos: General failure"
Can someone please give me some detailed info how partition my harddrive (4gb) using fdisk or something elsethat can be started from floppy.
Thanks.

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WhoDo
Posts: 4428
Joined: Wed 12 Jul 2006, 01:58
Location: Lake Macquarie NSW Australia

Re: need help with partitions

#2 Post by WhoDo »

3lo wrote:hi everyone, i have an old laptop Dell inspiron 3000, no cdrom, but have the usb. Tried puppy linux, booting from usb with the help of floppy. Everything worked fine until...
i started playing with partitions.
I started formating them and changing types and so on. Well i am not an expert on partitoning but anyway, i read somewhere about mbr, could i possibly erased it?
Back to my problem, now i cant even start puppy from usb. it gives me error "C: Dos: General failure"
Can someone please give me some detailed info how partition my harddrive (4gb) using fdisk or something elsethat can be started from floppy.
Thanks.
fdisk will do it. Are you sure it's the hdd you partitioned? Puppy on USB should boot from floppy regardless of the state of any partition on C-drive, provided that you have set the boot order correctly in your BIOS setup. Only problem is if you messed with the USB partition (which should be fat).

If it is C-drive you've whacked, you need to boot from a bootable floppy, run fdisk and select '4' to view your current partition information. Take note of any partitions shown. If there are none then so much the better.

Then press ESC and go back to the menu. Create a new DOS partition and make it active. fdisk will require a reboot. Having rebooted you will then need to run format /u /s c: to format your C-drive to DOS/Win and transfer system boot files.

All of this assumes that you want to later perform a frugal install to the hard drive from USB.

Hope that helps.

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