Puppy 4.0 Universal Installer LS-120 option defunct

[otropogo]

Although LS-120 support in Puppy has only ever limped along, it's now gone completely. In Versions 2.17, 3.01 Retro and 3.01, the Universal Installer still recognized the LS-120 drive, and attempt to install Puppy to it. With a lot of patience (I had two successful installs out of 30-40 attempts), and some luck, you could get an LS-120 install from CDROM on a desktop based drive, and then boot from the LS-120 on a laptop with no CDROM.

For anyone interested in trying this with 2.17 or 3.01, the recommended partitioning approach never worked for me, only the discouraged "superfloppy" mode ever created a bootable disk. Apparently, some BIOSes with LS-120 boot support (I've only tried three) just aren't smart enough to boot from a partition on a floppy.

It wasn't much of a victory, because, for reasons unknown, the LS-120 install gave no boot options, and wouldn't load into RAM, no matter how much RAM was available, and so had to access the drive all the time, making it excruciatingly slow (3x floppy speed), noisy, and hard on the rare drive. Almost as bad, I couldn't modify my LS-120 install. I couldn't even change my default keyboard with the startup configuration app.

But, it did allow me to enable my pcmcia cards, get online with both wired and wireless ethernet adapters, and install Puppy to hard drive.

The catch is that all of that limited LS-120 capability seems to have been provided by M.U.T., not Pmount. With the elimination of MUT, Puppy 4.0 can't see LS-120 drives at all, let alone install to them.

So, unless there's a possibility of bringing MUT back, this "option" should really be removed from the Universal Installer menu.

I haven't tried the same menu option with a ZIP drive yet, but will try to do so in the next week or two (if I can find my IDE ZIP, and it still works)

[otropogo]

...I haven't tried the same menu option with a ZIP drive yet, but will try to do so in the next week or two (if I can find my IDE ZIP, and it still works)

I found and installed my IDE ZIP100 drive and tried it under Puppy 4.0.

Although initially Pmount didn't list it, I tried the Puppy Universal Installer's 'internal ZIP or LS-120" option, and it was recognized as hdb4. And when I cancelled the installation and reopened Pmount, it was listed there too, and mounted without problems.

Finally, I tried doing the install to hdb4, and it seemed to go rather too quickly, but that may be because I had already copied all the files from the CDROM previously. So possibly the Universal Installer just sees all the files are there, and the right size, and shuts down. Each time I tried it, the CD-drive ejected the CD, presumably signalling the completion of the install.

So this option should not be removed from the Universal Installer. All that's needed is to edit our the "LS-120" part of the menu entry.