Step by Step: Installing Puppy Linux to Your Hard Drive

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Mechsus

Step by Step: Installing Puppy Linux to Your Hard Drive

#1 Post by Mechsus »

Step by Step: Installing Puppy Linux to Your Hard Drive
A Linux Newbie Guide

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BarryK
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#2 Post by BarryK »

Mechsus,
I read through your howto, very clear, can't see anything that needs changing in it, concise. Summary: great!

Though, I suppose if someone doesn't want a msdos partition, they don't have to do that, maybe if the hd is on the small size.
Because, booting from a live-CD, puppy will create the pup001 file in whatever is there, ext2, ext3, reiserfs, or vfat. A pup001 file in an installed puppy partition is no problem.

I know, installation to hd is a problem if the partition is "in use" with a pup001 in it, but you could boot the live-cd without a pupxxx, just running in ramdisk.
But, yeah, simpler to have the msdos/vfat partition -- and more flexible, to keep the pup001 file out of the way when you want to mess around with the hd installation, like wipe and reinstall.

Bruce B

Now I'm curious - a question for Barry

#3 Post by Bruce B »

Thanks!

My first experience with Puppy drove me nuts, until I figured out Puppy's personality.

All I wanted was for it to install the pup001 file on C: and it would not do it.

It would however install on other DOS drives. Just not the C drive.

Eventually, I figured out that it didn't install on the C: because it was FAT16. I converted it to FAT32 and it installed on the C: drive.

The version was 0.9.x - after that, I got rid of my FAT16 partitions in place of FAT32 and I've been getting along fine with Puppy and the FAT32 DOS partitions, thinking Puppy won't use the FAT16 the same as it will the FAT32.

Now I'm wondering, so I'll come right out and ask.

Barry, will Puppy use FAT16 as it does FAT32. If the answer is no, would you mind briefly explaining the difference?

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If there were 2 FAT32

#4 Post by raffy »

And if there were 2 FAT32 partitions, will Puppy behave such that the priority partition for pup001 will be the second partition?
Puppy user since Oct 2004. Want FreeOffice? [url=http://puppylinux.info/topic/freeoffice-2012-sfs]Get the sfs (English only)[/url].

Bruce B

using swap partitions

#5 Post by Bruce B »

Barry - as long as I've got your attention (hopefully). I'd appreciate knowing your opnion about recommending swap files for Puppy.

I make a swap partition for any Linux installation by policy. I have 384 MB RAM, and I still notice that free often reports swap usage after some hours uptime.

My conclusion is more or less: that Puppy uses the swap file even though I have 3x the min RAM requirements, and I'm not running heavy apps as a rule.

I'd be very interested in knowing your opinions on recommending making swap files or partitions for Puppy. I think many Puppy users don't have them.

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#6 Post by Bancobusto »

This may not be c e r t a i n for sure, but in my experience it seems to want to install pup001 on the first available fat32 drive.

At least that's the way that it does it on my machine :D

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#7 Post by Lobster »

Have placed the info here (but it needs cleaning up and formatting)
volunteers welcome

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HardDiskInstall

also check
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/HardDriveInstallBruce
Last edited by Lobster on Sat 18 Mar 2006, 14:52, edited 1 time in total.
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#8 Post by Bruce B »

MS-DOS version 6.22 FDISK has a hard drive limit of approximately 8.2 GB.

Maybe back in 1994 they thought that's all they would need it to do. I've never tried using it on a larger drive, so I can't say by experience what results a person would have or how it would perform on big drives.

I like having a bootable MS-DOS partition and some DOS software. I use MS-DOS version 7.10 and the downloadable MS FDISK with extra capacity.

If I'm setting up a drive from scratch, usually I'll install DOS. I try to anticipate my partitioning scheme in advance, and often use MS FDISK for entire partitioning process. I use it to make the primary partition, the extended partition and logical drives, which are going to be used by Linux later.

Suppose I was going to set up a big Linux distro on a 20 GB drive and only intended to have one Linux distro, I might partition it with FDISK roughly as follows:

---------------

primary 1 gb
extended the balance of drive
logical drive 526 MB
logical drive the balance of free space

----------------

Linux will see the drive like this:

hda1 1 gb (which I probably formatted as FAT prior to installing Linux)
hda5 (extended partition)
hda6 526 mb unformatted partition
hda7 approximately 18 gb unformatted partition

Many Linux setup programs set the partition types and format them during the installation process. Typically, a distro setup (they vary so much) would want to default install on hda7 and make a swap file on hda6.

You just tell it OKAY or if it doesn't see it your way, define the / and swap partitions.

The point of this post is: to explain how one can use MS-DOS FDISK to successfully create the entire partitioning scheme for Linux if you want.

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#9 Post by Walt H »

In his message signature, Raffy has the following:
raffy wrote:Puppy to Hard Disk = http://ph-islands.net/pupinstall/
In visiting that site, I was a bit confused by step 6, which reads as follows:

Image

Edit how? Why? I don't think I've ever had to edit the first file, and I've only had to edit fstab to add a Zip drive. Would this be the same if Puppy was to be the only OS on the hard drive and was installed into hda1?
Walt

Now that you point it out to me, the answer seems painfully obvious.

Bruce B

#10 Post by Bruce B »

Bancobusto wrote:This may not be c e r t a i n for sure, but in my experience it seems to want to install pup001 on the first available fat32 drive.

At least that's the way that it does it on my machine :D
There are a whole set of calculations Puppy makes. I don't know what they all are, but one of the factors seems to be checking free space. For example, I think it works such that if there is not enough free space on the first partition Puppy would normally want to use, it would look for another partition.

I do all option 1 installations manually, so I'm not too up on the default behavior, but it would be interesting to learn.

One thing, I've noted is, I can tell it with grub to install for example, a 256 mb pupxxx file on a given partition, which has less than 256 mb free space, Puppy will make a smaller pupxxx file leaving a few mb extra on the partition.

Mechsus

#11 Post by Mechsus »

BarryK wrote:Though, I suppose if someone doesn't want a msdos partition, they don't have to do that, maybe if the hd is on the small size.
I attempted to install Puppy with only an MS-DOS partition and without installing MS-DOS 6.22 - but couldn't crack it - although there must be a method (?).
Bruce B wrote:My first experience with Puppy drove me nuts, until I figured out Puppy's personality.
Tell me about it... 2 weeks messing with Puppy, hours on end looking at white text flashing up the screen, multiple screwed up installs - - I don't know what it is, but once the bug bites... You've got to master it. Woof, woof. Down boy!

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#12 Post by BarryK »

regarding a pup001 on fat16 partition, i don't see any reason why not.
it is a limitation of the rc.sysinit boot script.
i think the probepart program identifies a fat16 partition as "msdos" and a fat32 as "vfat" ...i think. and the script ignores any msdos partitions.
I can't recall any reason for that limitation, maybe i just assumed all hard drives not yet taken to the rubbish tip would be fat32.

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#13 Post by Lobster »

Based on the mature and stable freedos
http://www.freedos.org/

would it be possible to have a PuppyDOS boot disk for HD installation using this method?

;)
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#14 Post by danleff »

Lobster wrote:Have placed the info here (but it needs cleaning up and formatting)
volunteers welcome

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/wikka/HardDiskInstall
If not already done, I'll try to get to this in the next week. Let me know.
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#15 Post by Lobster »

Not done yet Danleff

A lot of editing always available on the wiki - it is quite a relaxing and satisfying task - but we have quite a lot of pages now :)

The two most useful buttons are the bold and indent and outdent

- it helps to be able to spot spelling mistakes 8)
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Mechsus
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#16 Post by Mechsus »

Lobster wrote:Have placed the info here (but it needs cleaning up and formatting) volunteers welcome
How do you do that? Does the Wikka need special privileges to access the data?

There's a couple of points I forgot to include - and remembered on a later Puppy install.

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#17 Post by Bancobusto »

Mechsus, I think that this will explain it to you better then I could http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic ... light=wiki

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#18 Post by danleff »

Mechsus, I edited (formatting) the page this am, but there is a little bit yet to go.

Let me know if I can assist in any way.

P.S. Looks like someone finished it. Looks pretty good.
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budden
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It works!

#19 Post by budden »

The step-by-step here works pretty much as advertised.


Nits. The canned script in the Puppy menu was not working -- somehow it wouldn't adapt to my particular situation. So I rooted around and found this.
- I used DR-DOS for the first partition rather than MS-DOS (because that's what I have on the dusty shelf). No particular diff, but seems that we ought to be able to garage-sale that stuff and do without entirely?
- the disk scrubbing is hygiene but not necessary to the install. I skipped because I didn't have the app.
- GRUB worked exactly as advertised. Read the edits to menu.lst to the mirror -- could use a slight editing for clarity (like what do you do with the 3 lines that are there already?). I cp'd a bak file first.



Hardware. I inherited a 1999-vintage Sony Vaio Picturebook PCG-C1X (the price was right). PCMCIA CDROM and USB floppy. And a 4G hda. The strange part about the hardware is that this is a dinky laptop, with a 1024x480 screen. It will work with 1024x762 but the bottom is chopped off...

Several other Linux installs hang because they boot the kernel but forget the PCMCIA interface somewhere in the boot process and can't get back to the CD to do any real installation. The one exception to that was Fedora Core 3 which did install to completion. But on reboot it promptly forgot about the PCMCIA CD interface ... (Core 4 hangs somewhere in bootup).

Puppy was one of the exceptions --it booted reliably from the CD, keep the PCMCIA interface intact and has low graphics overhead (GNOME, on the other hand, is very slow on older machines like this with comparatively low graphics RAM).
Rex Buddenberg

Bruce B

#20 Post by Bruce B »

Mechsus wrote: I attempted to install Puppy with only an MS-DOS partition and without installing MS-DOS 6.22 - but couldn't crack it - although there must be a method (?).
I tried to understand why you installed MS-DOS. I don't see any reason for it other than that you want to have a dual booting - Puppy/MS-DOS system. But this does not seem to be the reason you install MS-DOS.

Yesterday, I did some expermenting installing Puppy on a spare HD. The results of which indicate that it doesn't make any difference of you nuke the hd or install on a pre-partitioned HD, which I presume you know this. Except the nuking is as someone wrote, hygenic. But I've seen cases where nuking the drive is the only thing that gets it working right again.

If the HD is partioned you can delete the partitions by booting Puppy CD and using cfdisk or fdisk to delete the partitions.

Suppose we start off with a drive that has either been nuked or the partitions deleted with Linux fdisk or cfdisk.

The basic procedure is insert the Puppy CD and boot the computer.

Puppy won't install the pup001 file on this type of drive because there are no partitions.

After answering the keyboard, mouse and vide mode questions you will be running Puppy in RAM with no partitions mounted, because there are none.

You can then use fdisk or cfdisk to make a primary Linux partition (hex 83)

Then start the Puppy hard drive setup program. It will recognize hda1 and install on it if you tell it to install on /dev/hda1. The installation process will create the ext2 file system.

When it comes time to decide to install GRUB go ahead and do it. I usually install it to the MBR.

After the installation process is completed, mount hda1, and edit /boot/grub/menu.lst to verify that it has the commands as you wish.

Then reboot.

-------------------

As for my own use, I prefer to have MS-DOS and Linux. I use the GRUB for DOS as my boot manager.

I also think Puppy's GRUB script needs work, because I've never been able to install GRUB to the MBR on hda, IF I have other drives attached. If hda is the only drive then it has installed on hda.

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