Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[PsyBaba]

So... I have been struggling with installing Puppy lupu-528 and later lupu-528.004 to a USB thumb drive 2 whole afternoons and found 2 (or maybe 3) bugs. I will deal with one bug at a time, because there are a lot of questions I have about each one.

Here comes the first one:
When installing to the USB thumb drive with Barry's "Bootflash Install Puppy to USB" http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=00599 I get just a "boot error" when trying to boot from it. When installing to the same drive with same partitions (made by the flash installer) with the "Universal installer" the drive boots fine.

I have tried all options of the "Bootflash Install Puppy to USB" (Superfloppy, Combo, USB-HDD,...) and nothing worked. When installing with the "Universal installer" I left the default options untouched (so, no fancy MBR or repartitioning with Gparted) and it did! ... where's the trick?

What does the "Universal installer" do, that "Bootflash Install Puppy to USB" doesn't?[/url]

[bigpup]

Just to make sure. You are talking about "Bootflash Install Puppy to USB"?

[PsyBaba]

[bigpup]

Are you using the version of "Bootflash" that comes with Lupu 528?
Is this the one that needs to be looked at? The "Bootflash" that is included in Lupu 528.
It should be a newer version, than the reference you give in Barry's blog.

[PsyBaba]

Yep, that's right! And I'm using it straight out of pfix=ram environment to make sure nothing is messing things up.

Even if it is a newer version it looks like it's not adapted to Lupu... otherwise it wouldn't make a primary partition (in ComboFormat) so small not to let initrd.gz make it's work during bootup, resulting in Kernel panic.

And I'm not the only one having this problem:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=64367&start=15 Here ellgor tried the same and had similar results:

[BarryK]

The bootflash script has had many changes since 2009.

I have bumped the 128M first partition up to 256M, but have not tested it.

Here is my blog post:

http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02740

There is a link to the latest version of the bootflash script.

[PsyBaba]

Cool!

This weekend I spent some time trying to bump it up to 133MB, by modifying this line

[PsyBaba]

Sorry I was busy... so it took some time to test it.

Well the results left me with mixed feelings:
The old BootFlash #110130 with ComboFormat option set
1. Created a 128MB FAT16 primary partiton (too small for Lupu)
2. After rebooting gave me "boot error" (not on all computers, but just on some of those I need to work on)
3. After installing with Universal Installer without touching the deafult settings (no repartitioning and no fancy MBR) Puppy booted OK on all tested computers.

The new BootFlash #120311 with ComboFormat option set
1. Created a 256MB primary partiton, but it made it FAT32 (like when I tried to manually edit the script). I don't know if this is a bug, but as I can read it from the script it was supposed to be FAT16.
2. After rebooting gave me again the usual "boot error"
3. After installing with Universal Installer without touching the deafult settings Puppy again booted OK.

I have tried the script on 3 different USB sticks to make sure the "boot error" doesn't have something to do with a quirky stick. But when testing them on different computers I found out it has something to do with the way computers see the installation on the stick (I suppose it's BIOS fault). But as with Universal Installer the ComboFormat install works on all tested computers I suspect there is something it does better than BootFlash.

EDIT: I did a mistake when testing... it doesn't work at all (on none of the tested computers). It gives a black screen with the message:
[/code]
HDD EBIOS
boot error
[code]
right at the beginning - nothing is shown before this message.
Is there anyone else willing to test this out?

And I found out that BootFlash does some funny things to partitons:
1. The old BootFlash #120311 created 2 partitions which were seen by Gparted as FAT16 and FAT32, but cfdisk reports them both FAT16!
[code]
Partition Table for /dev/sdb

First Last
# Type Sector Sector Offset Length Filesystem Type (ID) Flag
-- ------- ----------- ----------- ------ ----------- -------------------- ----
4 Primary 0 262143 32 262144 FAT16 (06) Boot
1 Primary 262144 1980415 0 1718272 FAT16 (06) None

Partition Table for /dev/sdb

---Starting--- ----Ending---- Start Number of
# Flags Head Sect Cyl ID Head Sect Cyl Sector Sectors
-- ----- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----------- -----------
1 0x00 0 1 128 0x06 63 32 966 262144 1718272
2 0x00 0 0 0 0x00 0 0 0 0 0
3 0x00 0 0 0 0x00 0 0 0 0 0
4 0x80 1 1 0 0x06 63 32 127 32 262112
[/code]
2. The new The new BootFlash #120311 creates 2 partitions which are seen by Gparted as FAT32, but gpart reports first partition as FAT16 and second as FAT 32!
Partition Table for /dev/sdb
[code]
First Last
# Type Sector Sector Offset Length Filesystem Type (ID) Flag
-- ------- ----------- ----------- ------ ----------- -------------------- ----
4 Primary 0 524287 32 524288 W95 FAT32 (0B) Boot
1 Primary 524288 1980415 0 1456128 FAT16 (06) None

Partition Table for /dev/sdb

---Starting--- ----Ending---- Start Number of
# Flags Head Sect Cyl ID Head Sect Cyl Sector Sectors
-- ----- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----------- -----------
1 0x00 0 1 256 0x06 63 32 966 524288 1456128
2 0x00 0 0 0 0x00 0 0 0 0 0
3 0x00 0 0 0 0x00 0 0 0 0 0
4 0x80 1 1 0 0x0B 63 32 255 32 524256[/code]

[bigpup]

Barry has posted some info on working on Bootflash.
http://bkhome.org/blog/?viewDetailed=02767

[PsyBaba]

Cool, I will follow that blog, to see how the issue is getting resolved. I also saw Barry's note "none of this work applies to Lupu", so I will wait till he releases an improved version and then test it on Lupu...