Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[Mr. Maxwell]

I have a 9 year old laptop that has puppy installed on the hard drive (the hard drive only has one partition). I would also like to boot of my USB flash drive (16GB, first partition is 10GB FAT32 storage, second partition is 3GB ext3 Puppy, third is 3GB ext3 nothing yet, maybe another Puppy in the future).

The problem is my BIOS does not support USB booting and your pup2usb does not work. I followed the instructions carefully and everything went OK but when I rebooted the computer it went to the grub prompt instead of the menu. I have another boot/menu.lst on my hard drive which I have been booting off of, can I just use this one instead of putting one on my flash drive?

I have GRUB on a floppy BTW.

Thanks.

[Mr. Maxwell]

I got it to work! This is taken from menu.lst on my puppy hard drive installation:

[rjbrewer]

A questions remains:

With puppy on an ext 3 partition; will you be able to stick the
flashdrive into a "windows" computer and boot from it?

[Mr. Maxwell]

That's a good question but I have no idea. The BIOS on both of my windows computers are very weird and I cannot boot puppy on them. (I'll worry about this when I get new computers to replace them, right now windows is fine) If you go off of how windows treats each partition as a seperate device it should be able to boot off of the second partition. As for the ext3 filesystem I don't think that would make a difference, as long as it can read the boot sector (or whatever it's called) it should boot right?

But the easy way to find out is, grab a flash drive, reformat to ext3, put Puppy on it, stick it in a windows computer, and see if it boots.

[rjbrewer]

My question was rhetorical:

The flash drive will only boot on the computer you have the
grub list for it installed on.

If instead; you had made a 1st vfat partition for puppy and
used the simple universal installer method, the flash drive
would be bootable on almost any windows or linux computer that
has a usb port. Including your own. No grub necessary.

[Mr. Maxwell]

But the laptop I wanted to boot it off of did not have USB booting ability. Puppy does not work on my other 2 computers so it does not matter.

[rjbrewer]

Let me reiterate.

Neither my laptop or pc has usb booting. It does not make a
difference.
Using wakepup2 floppy or the cd-puppy pmedia=usbflash
is all it takes to boot the flashdrive

[rjbrewer]

delete this post

[Mr. Maxwell]

But I use GRUB to boot puppy off of my hard drive, this way I only need one boot disk. Since I never use my floppy drive it just stays in there and never leaves. Wakepup2 does not boot ext* partitions so I have to use GRUB.

BTW I just figured out you cannot have more than one bootable Puppy partitions on one flash drive.

EDIT:

Actually you can but you just get the "Type a number to choose which personal file to use:" prompt. Same thing as if you put it all on one partition.

[rjbrewer]

Yes; I discovered the problem with trying to boot multiple
puppies off flash yesterday. Maybe there's a workaround.

It's fine that your method is working for you; but it negates
one of the nicest attributes of a flash drive install, "portability".
So I wouldn't recommend it except in very rare cases.

[rjbrewer]

Created a couple small fat32 partitions and 1 large ext 3
partition on flash drive. Installed 2 different Pups on first 2
parts..

Did not make Pup-save files. Deleted boot flags.
Each Pup boots from the cd it was created from using
puppy pmedia=usbflash. Ext.3 is used as save file.

[ecomoney]

I want to make a liveCD that is bootable into puppy 4.2, geexbox and DBAN. Is this doable with one of these methods?

[d4p]

[rjbrewer]

Ummm...

This idea of including Dariks Boot & Nuke in a multi-iso cd ,
has potentially hilarious repercussions.

Please keep us informed of any long term consequences.

ha ha ha

[ecomoney]

Thanks guys for the links, its my "business" day today, but I will give them a try tonight when I get in.