Puppy Combo Boot Creator

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rcrsn51
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Puppy Combo Boot Creator

#1 Post by rcrsn51 »

Edit] Project withdrawn due to lack of community interest.

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Last edited by rcrsn51 on Mon 16 May 2016, 10:14, edited 12 times in total.

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Mike Walsh
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#2 Post by Mike Walsh »

Greetings, Bill.

Well, I got back a day early, so I thought I'd have a crack at this.

Wonderfully simple, and easy-peasy to use, as always. :) I decided to start off with just one .iso, to try it out with. I chose Carolina 1.3.....this being one that I've tried many times to install to USB. It'll always install.....but always refuses to boot. 'Can't find the Puppy SFS file..'

So, I installed the pet. Formatted the drive to ext4, as suggested. Opened up CBC. Chose the drive (in this case, sdg1). I know it seems quite a high drive letter, but I have one of these all-in-one card readers fitted to this old Compaq of mine. Doesn't work, and I keep meaning to remove it, but the various readers occupy sda's c through to f.

Added the iso. Takes about 90 seconds or so, which is par for the course. Chose 'Make Boot iso'. Opened pBurn (which is now my favourite burner software, incidentally), selected 'CBC.iso' from /tmp, and burned that to CD.

And so to the moment of truth. Set the CD ready to boot, then powered down. Plugged the flash drive into the hub, and switched on. Then booted-up, and.....

I'm writing this from FireFox in Carolina 1.3, running on a 4GB TF250 TDKMedia flash drive. It works, Bill, it bloody works! Yes!!

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

I had a few anxious moments when I first booted up, after the initial 'Loading drivers to access disks' showed. I thought nothing was going to happen for a moment, as some 'errors' appeared..! As it turns out, they were related to an install of SliTaz I've put on my external hard drive this morning, trying to prove a point following a query in the Beginner's forum. Somebody wants to know if they can do a full install to a partition on an external USB hard drive.....and since I have the same kind of setup, I thought I'd try it. I just haven't sorted out the boot stanza for it yet; SliTaz is a lovely little distro, but a real PITA to boot. The menu.lst stanza has to be re-written from the ground up, and SliTaz requires the older 'hda' format, as opposed to the more modern 'sda, etc.

Anyway; thank you so much for this. Very easy to use, as always, and, to quote a British TV advert of recent years, 'it does exactly what it says on the tin'. Well done..!

Now, we just need somebody else to give it a go. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this problem.....


Mike. :D
Last edited by Mike Walsh on Sat 03 Oct 2015, 20:26, edited 1 time in total.

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rcrsn51
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#3 Post by rcrsn51 »

Thanks for testing. This confirms my suspicions about the "SFS file not found" problem. It is some kind of USB timing issue that only appears on certain Puppy/hardware combinations. The work-around is to start the boot process on a non-USB device.

For your convenience, I will increase the Flash drive drop-down list to sdg1.

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Mike Walsh
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#4 Post by Mike Walsh »

I do have a couple of questions, while I think about it.

1) Obviously, the boot CD needs to be used each time. I'm right in thinking (having looked at it) that it's fairly generic, yes? There's no distro-specific stuff there, from what I can see.

2) Should I want to try some other distros, do they all just go on the same partition...like isobooter? I'm still not too clear about how this 'frugal' stuff works, yet...

3) Am I right in thinking that if I want to add more pups at a later date, then I'll need to re-run the 'Make Boot ISO' command again? Or do you need to add all Pups at the same time?

EDIT: One thing I did notice. When the Grub menu came up, instead of an actual menu entry, there was just a red bar across the window, where you would expect to see the 'title'? A 'glitch' perhaps?

Otherwise...perfect.


Mike. :wink:
Last edited by Mike Walsh on Sat 03 Oct 2015, 17:44, edited 1 time in total.

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rcrsn51
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#5 Post by rcrsn51 »

Mike Walsh wrote:Obviously, the boot CD needs to be used each time. I'm right in thinking (having looked at it) that it's fairly generic, yes? There's no distro-specific stuff there, from what I can see.
No. If you mount the CD or the CBC.iso, you will see a folder for each Puppy that contains its specific vmlinuz and initrd.gz.
Should I want to try some other distros, do they all just go on the same partition?
Yes. Up to the maximum capacity of the flash drive.

But here is a variation. Format Partition #1 as FAT32 for Windows-compatible storage and format Partition #2 for Puppy. In CBC, always select Partition #2. Puppy should be smart enough to find its boot files there.

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Mike Walsh
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#6 Post by Mike Walsh »

Fair enough. If you refresh the page, you'll see I've added a couple of things to my last post. I think we were both posting at the same time...

Mike. ;)

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rcrsn51
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#7 Post by rcrsn51 »

EDIT: One thing I did notice. When the Grub menu came up, instead of an actual menu entry, there was just a red bar across the window, where you would expect to see the 'title'? A 'glitch' perhaps?
Because Puppy users tend to like bright and shiny things, I picked red as the background color for the highlighted item. You should see the title as white-on-red.

If this doesn't work for your particular video, I will change it back to the GRUB standard display.

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Mike Walsh
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#8 Post by Mike Walsh »

Because Puppy users tend to like bright and shiny things, I picked red as the background color for the highlighted item. You should see the title as white-on-red.

If this doesn't work for your particular video, I will change it back to the GRUB standard display.
Point taken! If it helps at all, I'm using the ati_radeon module, driving a 1024x768 display (with a colour depth of 24).

The red bar comes up, but I'm not getting the text showing, that's all. With only one distro on there at the moment, it's a moot point.....but if I add others, it might get a wee bit tricky...

I need some more flash drives!


Mike. :wink:

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rcrsn51
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#9 Post by rcrsn51 »

CBC v1.1 posted above.

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Mike Walsh
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#10 Post by Mike Walsh »

Okay. Thanks, Bill. I'll give the new version a try tomorrow; it's nearly 1.30 am over here....I'm ready for bed!

I'll let you know how I get on with it.


Mike. :wink:

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rcrsn51
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#11 Post by rcrsn51 »

Mike Walsh wrote:Am I right in thinking that if I want to add more pups at a later date, then I'll need to re-run the 'Make Boot ISO' command again? Or do you need to add all Pups at the same time?
8. The flash drive contains the CBC "build" folder, so you can add more Puppies to your setup in future sessions.

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Mike Walsh
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#12 Post by Mike Walsh »

Thanks for the clarification, Bill.

Right. I've erased, and re-created Carolina 1.3 on the TDK with v1.1. All looking good; thanks for increasing the drop-down list (much appreciated!).

As before, the only problem is the text of the title not showing in the GRUB menu. It must be peculiar to my hardware. It won't be a problem for me. personally, as I'm intending to stick to a 'one Pup per drive' policy; just need to keep the appropriate boot disk with the right Puppy..!

I very much doubt it's anything to do with your coding. I do get the odd issue with this machine; I've grown accustomed to devising 'workarounds', because in every other respect, this 10 yr+ old 'puter runs so well.....and will give many modern machines, on recent versions of Windows, a damn good run for their money..!


Mike. :)

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#13 Post by rcrsn51 »

Do you boot off the hard drive on this machine with a GRUB menu? Does the text show there?

Do you have another machine on which you could test this?

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Mike Walsh
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#14 Post by Mike Walsh »

rcrsn51 wrote:Do you boot off the hard drive on this machine with a GRUB menu? Does the text show there?
Yes, I do. She currently runs Win XP on sda1; Tahrpup 6.03 on sda2; 'Chromebook' Pup on sda3.....and SliTaz 4.0 on sda7. All booted from Grub4DOS with no issues....with visible text.
rcrsn51 wrote:Do you have another machine on which you could test this?
Well, there's the old Dell lappie! I've no idea whether it'll work on there, but I can certainly try it. Despite her age (2002) she was one of the very first machines Dell produced that was capable of booting from hard drive, CD or USB. I'll give it a whirl.....it's got two chances..!

I'll let you know whether it works or not. Bear with me.


Mike.

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#15 Post by rcrsn51 »

It would be nice if one other person would confirm that this thing works. But I'm not holding my breath.

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Mike Walsh
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#16 Post by Mike Walsh »

Just what I've been thinking myself! Perhaps a post in one of the other forums.....with a link to this thread?

Now then; I've just tried this on the old Dell. I didn't expect Carolina to display on there; the 'Brookedale'-cored, Intel 82845 G/GL/GE/PV 'Extreme' graphics controller is an absolute nightmare with most of the older Puppies. They'll boot fine.....but once the X-server starts, that's it; no cigar.

However; the boot process (which is what we're interested in here) works fine; the boot disk passes over control to the flash drive beautifully :D . But the title problem remains; no text showing.

So, I don't know what the issue could be with that. BTW, how did we get onto this subject in the first place? I forget now. I know I posted a reply in one of your threads.....but I'm hanged if I can remember which one it was now...!


Mike. :lol:

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Mike Walsh
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#17 Post by Mike Walsh »

Answered my own question; it was the isobooter thread, of course.

I've just PM'ed somebody else who I think would be interested; davids45, who also posted in the 'isobooter' thread, and who agreed with me over the suspicions about the USB timing issue. I'll see if he gets back to me.


Mike. :wink:

gcmartin

#18 Post by gcmartin »

Works

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rcrsn51
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#19 Post by rcrsn51 »

gcmartin wrote:Works
Thanks.

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rcrsn51
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#20 Post by rcrsn51 »

Thank you to Mike Walsh and Jasper for their comprehensive testing and identifying some problems.

V1.1 2015-10-05 is now up-to-date.

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