How to get your savefile off NTFS

How to do things, solutions, recipes, tutorials
Post Reply
Message
Author
gyro
Posts: 1798
Joined: Tue 28 Oct 2008, 21:35
Location: Brisbane, Australia

How to get your savefile off NTFS

#1 Post by gyro »

This assumes that multi booting a puppy frugal install on a Windows machine is already sorted out.

1) In windows, open "Disk Management" and shrink the C: drive. If windows complains that there is not enough space, reduce the shrink size. Try to get at least 10GB.
2) In windows rename any savefile, prepending an 'X', so puppy won't find it.
3) Boot into puppy, it should come up as first boot, if not, reboot with 'pfix=ram'.
4) In the system menu select 'Gparted', and create an ext3 (or ext4) partition in the unallocated space created in step 1).
5) Copy any savefile from the NTFS partition to a corresponding directory in the new ext3 partition. e.g. if it's in "C:/puppy/" then copy it to "/puppy/" within the ext3 partitions mountpoint.
6) Rename the savefile on the ext3 partition to remove the 'X'.
7) Reboot puppy without saving.

If puppy finds the savefile on the ext3 partition, it will write a small "SAVEMARK" file into the puppy frugal insatall directory on the NTFS volume, and then never write to the NTFS partition again.

If puppy does not find the savefile, and comes up as first boot, then to get puppy to write a "SAVEMARK" file, reboot with "save" to create a new temporary savefile. Make sure to append something to the savefile filename to make it different from the real savefile.
On this boot puppy should find both savefiles, choose the real one. Once puppy is up, delete the temporary savefile.

The old savefile on NTFS can be deleted, once it is established that puppy is using the savefile on the ext3 partition.
/mnt/home should now be the ext3 partition.

if there is no existing savefile, then skip steps 2), 5) and 6), and in step 7) reboot with save and choose to save on the ext3 partition.

Note1: A web search for "Windows shrink partition" provides lots of detailed instructions, e.g. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/maga ... 09169.aspx.

Note2: If the particular puppy supports it, savefolder instead of savefile, is now an option. The utility 'savefile2dir' can be used to convert the savefile to a savefolder, http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=96472.

Note3: I tested this with TahrPup.

Edit: With the latest 'shutdownconfig' it's not necessary to worry about creating a duplicate savefile, it detects the existing savefile, and modifies the name of the new one to avoid a conflict. I don't know if older versions of 'shutdownconfig' do the same.

gyro

Post Reply