Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

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In a recent “HOWTO” - (How to Dual boot Puppy & XP from USB using syslinux & grub4dos) I described how to dual boot with Puppy installed on removable media. Grub4dos, chain-loaded off syslinux, provided the means to boot from the C: drive with nothing to install or edit on the hard disc.

That post can be found below & I would advise that you study it first before reading on:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=79955

The method described below involves installing Puppy (just the main sfs & save file) on the hard drive and using the removable media to boot from and to provide the dual boot in an identical manner.

For the purpose of this method I used a very old 16 Meg SmartMedia card made bootable with syslinux 4.04 & used vesamenu.c32
Tests were carried out with Slacko 5.3.3.2
You could equally well use a USB stick or SD card.

This method takes advantage of the faster boot speed when the main puppy files are held on the hard disc, frees up a USB port and makes use of an otherwise redundant card reader slot.

STEPS:
1. Defrag your NTFS volume on your Windows hard disc and then create a suitably named directory off the root. (In this case c:\p5332)

2. Move your main sfs & save file into this new directory. From puppy’s perspective this will be seen as /mnt/home/p5332 – on sda1



3. On your card or stick (sdd1 in this example-YMMV) create the structure shown below.

Notes:
a) Initrd.gz & vmlinuz are held in a new directory off the root of the card also named p5332. Move your pup’s files into it.
b) The boot directory does not contain any files only the sub-directory grub.
c) The grub directory contains the 2 required grub4dos files.
d) The splash screens together with syslinux.cfg & vesamenu.c32 are held in the root.
e) The hidden ldlinux.sys file is the syslinux boot loader created when syslinux was used to make the card bootable.


4. Use the following block of code in your syslinux.cfg or use the one attached which contains it. If need be, modify only the puppy part to suit your particular pup.

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View of menu.

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An alternate high quality splash screen (beach.png) for syslinux is attached. (Resolution 1024x768 - 1.41MEG)
I did not expect this to work but having converted it from jpg to png it loads with no discernable delay.
Your MMV as syslinux's ability to display high quality splash screens varies with the
vesa abilities of the video chip or card & display. Having said that I am using a 7 year
old Nvidia GeForce 7300SE & later cards/chips have improved dramatically since then.

Also attached is a copy of vesamenu.c32 from syslinux 4.04.

The revised block of syntax for syslinux.cfg is as follows with the other splash screens simply commented out.