Running Puppy from Bootable USB - problems

[Moondance]

I am a NEWBIE to Puppy, so please don't shoot me because I don't know much, or because I don't even know which version of Puppy I'm running...

Anyway, basically, I use Windows XP. Daemon Tools has a stupid little .sys file that has become corrupt, and despite it being completely unessential, the stupid computer tries to load said .sys file at the start of every bootup, and due to it being corrupt, it won't load and windows goes nowhere, but into a relentless cycle of blue screen, power down, restart, try again.

SO .... enter puppy. Well over a year ago I made a bootable USB flash drive of Puppy for emergencies such as this. I loaded up the USB, booted in, and attempted to mount my hard drive.
Got this shiny red warning sign which scared the living bejesus out of me:





And then obviously, I couldn't rename, alter, delete anything on the hard drive. Which makes this exercise just a little pointless. I need to be able to rename or remove the corrupt file.

Can anybody please help? And I need this stuff in laymens terms. I'm a completely new person to Puppy and most of what I've read about reads like a foreign language to me.

<3 Hope someone can help, thanks!

[nooby]

interesting problem there. Could happen to many more maybe so would be cool if somebody is clever enough to find a solution.

I am a noob kind of person. So I fail to get what to do.

But I would use the search in my Signature and look for people that knows how one read such error messages. Look for if soembody has had same problem before.

Good luck

[disciple]

And then obviously, I couldn't rename, alter, delete anything on the hard drive.

Normally at this point you would copy the files you need off the drive

Unfortunately that's what you get with rubbish proprietary filesystems... but why do you think the problem is only one corrupt .sys file?

There might be something around that can repair it - have you looked?

[Burn_IT]

You could boot XP in safe mode and replace the file in there. or run Chkdsk /f

You can stop the endless loop cycle in XP if you press F8 while it is starting and choose the option that says, DO Not automatically restart on error. It will then give you the FULL ERROR message that you can report.

You can if really needed, boot into a command prompt using the XP install CD and issue commands from there.

[RetroTechGuy]

Got this shiny red warning sign which scared the living bejesus out of me:

As well it should.

I _really_ don't like that error. It is not normal from what I've seen (i.e. not a simple "unclean dismount of NTFS"). Potentially a real hardware problem.

Have you been messing around inside of your machine? Recently move the machine? (i.e. I'm wondering if you knocked a cable loose).

Power spike?... Been messing around in the BIOS?

BTW, the last time I went through a blue-screen-of-death loop, it was a bad memory module -- pulled the problem RAM, and it worked fine. However, this is reporting a HDD error (you could clearly boot Puppy).

A corrupted Windows file is not going to stop Puppy from mounting the drive. You've got something bigger going on.

As others suggested, try booting to safe mode (as Windows comes up, hit F8).

If that fails to correct the problem, get a HDD diagnostics disk from your HDD manufacturer and scan it. This can force a read of every sector, and in the process, sometimes "repair" the drive (i.e. force the on-board firmware to address the failing sector issue).

If or once you get it to read, be prepared to copy your important files off, onto a backup drive -- as you may have the onset of drive failure.