(OLD) (ARCHIVED) Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

chexmix · Joined: 12 Mar 2009 Posts: 1

Hi everyone. I've been using and abusing Linux since 1999 but am new to Puppy. I came to it because ... well, I did a Very Bad Thing night before last and rendered my multi-OS laptop (cough, dig toe in dirt) un-bootable. All the partitions were still there but my existing grub installation couldn't SEE them.

Short version: I used a live CD of another distro and managed to download and burn Puppy 4.1.2 to another disk. I booted it ...

... and was immediately amazed at how transparent and FAST Puppy is. This old box fairly SCREAMED and was so snappy I barely recognized it! After some fruitless mucking around I decided to opt for radical surgery and installed it on the partition where another Linux distro (and my previous grub install) used to be. Once I installed grub to the MBR (as the installation prompts suggested) I was able to reboot to a nice new grub screen.

The trouble is, none of the systems on logical partitions (including Puppy) want to boot. The other systems on primary partitions come up fine.

Here is what menu.lst has for Puppy:

rcrsn51 · Posted: Thu 12 Mar 2009, 10:11 Post subject:

Because your problem is affecting all the logical partitions, I suspect that your Very Bad Thing has damaged the partition table.

First, I would run the Gparted partition manager program (from the System menu) and see what it says about the partitions.

Then I would investigate using Testdisk. This little program is sometimes able to recover a damaged partition table. You may already have it in one of your working Linux's or you can find it on any recovery CD.

Bruce B · Posted: Thu 12 Mar 2009, 11:12 Post subject:

I don't know why you didn't check it out with a good rescue disk.

A rescue disk doesn't know what the problem is when you insert the disk, of course, but it will not mount every single partition, search every single partition and unmount every single partition and activate the swap partition.

Puppy doesn't know what the problem is either, but it does all the above as if there isn't a thought of there being a problem.

My thoughts are that a disk in trouble is likely in fragile condition and if you cannot justify mounting and searching every partition as something designed to fix things and can see were it might not be the best thing to be doing, then Puppy shouldn't be your choice for a rescue disk for that reason alone.

Also worth considering is Puppy doesn't come with a full set of tools for recovery and repair.