I use a varient of rockedge's to boot to a USB flash drive:
Boot to your favorite version of Puppy Linux on your main computer.
Mount the usb stick and use GParted to create a new partition spanning the entire drive and format to FAT2 then set the BOOT FLAG.
You can re-partition things later once everything is working.
Here is where I diverge:
Reboot the computer to a floppy disk that contains FreeDOS. I have a CD/DVD version if the computer
won't boot to floppy, and also have a USB external floppy drive that seems to work on about any computer.
The USB stick has to be plugged in BEFORE booting to FreeDOS. If successful, FreeDOS recognizes the USB
drive just fine. If there aren't any other mass storage devices enabled in the computer, the USB
drive appears as the C: drive.
SYS the USB thumb drive.
Then copy GRUB4DOS and FreeDOS's EDIT program to the USB drive.
Then re-boot and see if it works. Sometimes I need to go to the BIOS to get the computer to recognize
the USB drive.
If the FreeDOS sign-in appears, things are working well.
Then reboot and copy the three Puppy files (in my case, puppy_slacko_5.7.0.sfs, vmlinuz, and initrd.gz) to the root
or to a subdirectory on the flash drive. This can be done using either Puppy Linux or Windows.
Boot back to the USB thumb drive. Using MENU.LST of your choice, just type GRUB and the USB drive will
boot to Puppy Linux.
I have a stock MENU.LST that can be used, but since the USB drive has the EDIT utility, I can use it to
create a MENU.LST file from scratch.
I have used this method on at least a dozen USB thumb drives over the years. I keep a tiny thumb drive
on my key chain, and can boot to it using just about any computer that I happen to find.
This may seem like a roundabout way to create a Puppy Linux USB thumb drive, but I'm very used to it. The
nice thing to me is that any boot issues are pretty easy to isolate. I've booted thumb drives from
256 MB to 32GB using this method, with equal success.
I find that performance is really good no matter what computer I use as host. Since the frugal install
actually executes in RAM, it doesn't rely on the USB drive for performance.
Here is my typical MENU.LST:
Note with this version, I also have a don't care file called USBFLASH that GRUB looks for to set
the proper boot partition.
Code: Select all
timeout 5
default /default
title Slacko Puppy Linux 57 frugal install at /p57u
find --set-root /USBFLASH
kernel /p57u/vmlinuz psubdir=p57u pmedia=usbflash
initrd /p57u/initrd.gz
title Hard Drive hd1,0
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
chainloader +1
title commandline
commandline
title reboot
reboot
title halt
halt
I am typing this post using a USB flash drive installation. The particular flash drive is a Sandisk
Extreme 32GB, but it works with many others.