Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Larry Cotton · Joined: 12 Apr 2010 Posts: 13

Thank you very much for your informative relies llooseSCREWorTWO. I do have a new computer which I wish to boot lfrom USB, so I'll start by trying to get that going before going on to the old PC.

I have burnt the 421 iso's and tried to create the USB boot drive using the universal installer. When I do this I get an error saying that it can't find zdrv*.sfs. I did a manual search an couldn't find any such files either.

Does anyone know if I need to get these files separately from somewhere ?

rcrsn51 · Posted: Sun 18 Apr 2010, 17:58 Post subject:

Zdrvxxx.sfs files were driver files used by older Puppies. IIRC, the Universal Installer in 4.2.1 had a bug wherein it asked for a zdrv file that it didn't need anymore. Your flash drive may actually be bootable.

I notice in your original post that you had done a flash drive install using Puppy 4.3.1 that looked successful, but you were running it on an old machine that probably didn't support USB bootability. Did you try it on your newer machine?

Larry Cotton · Joined: 12 Apr 2010 Posts: 13

Hi

Thank you for your reply.

rcrsn51 · Posted: Mon 19 Apr 2010, 07:17 Post subject:

The conventional filesystem on a flash drive is fat16/fat32, so the standard bootloader is syslinux. However, the Puppy Universal Installer will also recognize an ext filesystem and use extlinux as the bootloader.

I would run Gparted, delete all the existing partitions on the flash drive and create a fresh fat32 partition. Then run the PUI again.

You might also want to try a different flash drive.

looseSCREWorTWO · Posted: Mon 19 Apr 2010, 07:45 Post subject:

My rantings and ravings on this Post was all about Flash Drives and how difficult the blasted little gombeens can be.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=54462

Larry Cotton · Joined: 12 Apr 2010 Posts: 13

Hi

Re-formating the USB drive to FAT 32 and using the universal installer worked for my new machine - I can now boot puppy from the usb drive.

This suggests that the bios on the acer machine I have needs a fat 32 filesystem to boot from usb. From what I have read so far I cannot understand why there should be any such dependency - does anyone know why this might be ?

Thank you very much for your help on this.

I'll get another usb stick to tackle the older machine.

looseSCREWorTWO · Posted: Tue 20 Apr 2010, 22:15 Post subject:

G'day Larry,
If the USB Stick works in your new PC you think it would work in the Acer as well. As described in the link in my last Post, the way USB Sticks and BIOS interact is a mystery. I have found Acer and Dell are the quirkiest of all. I have an old Pentium 4 Acer desktop that runs really well in Puppy, but it's BIOS will not tolerate more than 1 DVD Drive and 1 Hard Drive to be installed at Bootup. After Bootup I can plug in as many extra USB Sticks and USB HDs as I want, but if just one of them is plugged-in at Bootup BIOS refuses to start.

I thought of doing a BIOS update but that's risky any time and with Acer too much of a risk. Do the BIOS update wrong (or get a bad BIOS download from their website) and the CPU is borked.