Trouble saving Fatdog 710 session to a flash stick

[PappyPuppy]

I have this trash-picked laptop that I put a new graphics card and now it boots up to fatdog which I put onto a flash stick. The laptop has no hard-drive (at least as of yet). But when I shut the laptop down after the first boot-up, it was unable to save to the flash stick. Is this probably because I haven't given an friendly enough partition file-type - like ext4 or some other friendly file type? Just curious.

[drunkjedi]

Fatdog can create savefile on fat32 just fine.
Please give details about your usb drive, and what you actually mean by "unable to save to flash stick".
What error it gives and when?

[PappyPuppy]

sdc has 360 MB total and it's all used.
sdc2 has only 4096 bytes.

I must have made a boot flash stick some time ago and I didn't use anywhere near all of the flash stick.

So I need to allocate some more room outside of the fatdog usual stuff.
I guess I could do this in Gparted or somehow else.

I think I'll do this on the actual machine.

[bigpup]

sdc has 360 MB total and it's all used.
sdc2 has only 4096 bytes.

If this is all the usb flash drive can hold, it is too small.

You need at least a 1GB drive, but a 2GB or bigger would be better.

All you need is one partition that uses all the space on the drive.
I would format it ext 3.

Note:
May have to use Fat 32 format, because that old a computer may only be willing to boot from a usb flash drive that is fat 32 formatted.

[PappyPuppy]

sdc has 360 MB total and it's all used.
sdc2 has only 4096 bytes.

If this is all the usb flash drive can hold, it is too small.

You need at least a 1GB drive, but a 2GB or bigger would be better.

All you need is one partition that uses all the space on the drive.
I would format it ext 3.

Note:
May have to use Fat 32 format, because that old a computer may only be willing to boot from a usb flash drive that is fat 32 formatted.

Yeah, I don't know how I corrupted the original flash stick I was using in that laptop so I simply took it out and reburnt (with the newer .iso of 7.21) using the dd command that is described in this link:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/fa ... drive.html

I popped the new flash stick in and I booted successfully. This was all after fixing the on-off bezel problems and the keyboard not working (due to the ribbon cable needed to be pressed into place so it sticks).

So now I'm running. But I will NOT save any sessions yet until I get either another flash stick or a used hard-drive.

I just don't want to walk the same path I did before. I'm always for trying something different when a process fails. There is obviously some issue with my flash stick even though i was nice enough to make 3 perfectly friendly partitions on it and it's probably a 16GB or so flash stick. It just sucks for some reason, so I'll probably use that flash only to boot from until I can completely comprehend what the problem is. It might be a path issue. I need to dig deeper into how to do these things. I often have to use either drive mode or file mode in a fatdog save. It doesn't absolutely always work unless you know what you're doing (and I don't know what I'm doing well enough yet). So my trash-picked toy is working now.

By the way, the flash stick has the following:

sda, sda1, and sda2

But when I show properties, it always shows only 8192 bytes and extended attributes not supported. I think I have fat16, ntfs, ntfs. It's weird.

I just for test purposes dragged the help folder on sda over to sda2 and it did it fine. So I guess I can use sda1 and sda2. Then I dragged it over to sda1. So now I have some new files stored onto the flash stick for test.

[bigpup]

But when I show properties, it always shows only 8192 bytes and extended attributes not supported. I think I have fat16, ntfs, ntfs. It's weird.

Could be something about using fat16 format for that first partition, if there are 3 partitions.
Should use fat32 format.

What does Gparted show about the drive?

[PappyPuppy]

But when I show properties, it always shows only 8192 bytes and extended attributes not supported. I think I have fat16, ntfs, ntfs. It's weird.

Could be something about using fat16 format for that first partition, if there are 3 partitions.
Should use fat32 format.

What does Gparted show about the drive?

The others some mix of NTFS, ext4, ...

I can get a hard-drive cheap for that laptop - I should buy one. Tonight I have to put the 16 screws in that I left out and hopefully anything else I left out. Then troubleshoot why I can't listen to tunes nor anything else with the cd-rom - might be time for a new one. The OS knows it's there.

[bigpup]

What does Gparted show about the drive?

Sorry, I cannot help you if you do not answer specific questions.
I need to see exactly what Gparted shows for what is on the drive.

[don570]

Kernel options could help you find the save file.
You add this to kernel line of menu.lst file

Code: Select all

savefile=ask

or

Code: Select all

savefile=direct:local

Reference: http://distro.ibiblio.org/fatdog/web/fa ... tions.html
______________________________________________

[PappyPuppy]

What does Gparted show about the drive?

Sorry, I cannot help you if you do not answer specific questions.
I need to see exactly what Gparted shows for what is on the drive.

Although the desktop of Fatdog shows sda, sda1, and sda2, Gparted only shows:

/dev/sda iso9660 FATDOG_LIVE 14.75GiB

That's all it said. Only sda.

[PappyPuppy]

What does Gparted show about the drive?

Sorry, I cannot help you if you do not answer specific questions.
I need to see exactly what Gparted shows for what is on the drive.

Although the desktop of Fatdog shows sda, sda1, and sda2, Gparted only shows:

/dev/sda iso9660 FATDOG_LIVE 14.75GiB

That's all it said. Only sda.

I have another stick that I formatted as follows:

Device Volume Bytes Type
sdb1 Fatdog64 24GiB vfat
sdb3 NTFS 27GiB ntfs

I plan to reburn this with the latest Fatdog 7.21. Would I then be able to save sessions to the ntfs part of it? Or to the vfat? Can Fatdog be saved to either of these. I currently save my fatdog to an ntfs volume - it works reliably. Perhaps I should do that.

I have a hard-drive coming, but now that I discovered how to enable wifi on my new laptop toy, I am dying to save a session. But hell if I'm gonna try to save a session to the flash I'm booting from which is something weird.

Now for more analysis, if I plug the laptop's flash stick in to this machine and check it as I did above for the other one, it highlights like this:

sdb FATDOG_LIVE 14GiB iso9660
sdb1 FATDOG_LIVE 387MiB iso9660
sdb2 FATDOG_LIVE 10MiB vfat

I guess I would be best to use the former one I mention. I can change over to that flash stick.

[PappyPuppy]

Now I no longer have the partitions.

Now I need to re-do the flash again.

Hard to tell - maybe I didn't ruin it. It still has sdb, sdb1, and sdb3 and the vfat and ntfs are still there. Now it shows a full 59GB for the iso9660 (bootable) part. So now I will try to boot from it and see if I can save to the flash.

It didn't work. It didn't recognize the flash as a boot device.

Every time I plug a flash stick into a PC, I get a different reading of how large each partition is.

[PappyPuppy]

Using the dd command works but I guess I have to just make one volume - the problem is it makes the volume iso9660.

I want more than one volume

[PappyPuppy]

It doesn't work. My laptop is now again unbootable.

[PappyPuppy]

says that

Gparted will NOT understand the partitions. Why not?

[PappyPuppy]

It doesn't work. My laptop is now again unbootable.

Why does the procedure in the above URL in the Subject create a set of files that are completely different than what the dd command does? Why is there a file named Shellx64.efi and a directory drivers_x64? And why no help directory and lick directory?

[PappyPuppy]

After a couple boots, it says no working init found. I had written 0's to the flash. Apparently the flash is all corrupted now.

[PappyPuppy]

This time I did not run the fix-usb.sh as I would like to understand the processes better.

I can now boot up the laptop using the flash.
And I took the Sandisk flash stick that's now problematic and I reformatted it on the laptop under Fatdog 7.21 to have ext4, ntfs, and linux-swap. Now what I need to know by tomorrow hopefully is how can I get fatdog to save it's session to one of the flash-sticks, preferably the Sandisk. It didn't work the last time with the boot stick and I was left with a completely unbootable operating system. I don't want to save to the flash stick that I boot from. I'm spending too much time with experiments all the time that lead to failures. One of the flash sticks is sda and the other is sdb, but it has multiple partitions (so does the first one). Can I tell fatdog somehow to save to the proper one and can I enable RAM storage. I know fatdog has all of these flags but when fatdog boots up, I have no idea what to do when it presents the menu, and i only have a few seconds. Perhaps I can read overnight what to do and start on this tomorrow.

At least I have a bootable laptop that has wifi - it doesn't appear to be ruined yet.

[PappyPuppy]

I guess my problem is I would love to simply boot up fatdog and simply have some parameter like:

savefile=/dev/sdb1;RAM30
savefile=/dev/sdb2;ONLYONSHUTDOWN
savefile=/dev/sdb2/SomeDirOnsdb2

etc..


I know that this is all possible but I have to learn a lot of stuff.

And I would like to put in wait=10:10

I want a slower boot as the gaming laptop is an extremely fast computer. It boots like 10 x as fast an old XP machine.

I would also like longer than 7 seconds to boot. Perhaps there is a file on the boot flash stick that I can edit? I don't know yet.

[PappyPuppy]

So I shutdown the machine, but just before I checked my flash sticks and I chose one to save to. I decided to use the directory option and simply use what the prompt suggested with no changes.

I then shut the machine down. Then on first boot, I didn't choose the 2nd line which is use the USB, and it was not able to find the savefile, which makes sense as it has a catch-22 (ie. no bootstraps). So I then re-booted and this time I told it to look in the USB. When it looked there, it found the savefile and booted up.

So then I set up the wifi, and I rebooted and the next time it booted, it automatically connected to the Internet. So now I don't need to keep setting up wifi.

So I now have a number of skills to master, above and beyond the preceding:

1) How to pause the boot process so I can tell it what I want OR: Tell it what I want on next boot. AND Where are these so-called icons that I can simply flush my RAM layer to disk when I want. I want all that stuff working because I want complete control over saves. I don't mind if after a couple hours it saves. This is basically a toy, game computer, not for real intense stuff that's important. I just want to flush it out. I have a hard-drive coming so this only has to last a few days.

2) What to say on boot
savefile=ram:device:sda1:fd64save? Something like this? I use the directory approach - it doesn't have a .ext4 file I just checked. The little Fatdog icon is now on my usb flash icon so I know it's working. But what should I say? Now each time I boot, I have to choose the 2nd line don't I? Or I mean I have to get a prompt now? Or can I save the above somehow?