Strange goings-on at Boot Time for 15-yr old SAGER laptop...

[Mike Walsh]

Evening, all.

Now, then; as the title says, I really need some advice from you guys out there who are more expert with solving boot issues than I am.

I'm trying to help one of the staff members over at BleepingComputer.com to get Pup up-and-running on an ancient Sager laptop. It's circa 2001/2 vintage, and has very similar specs to my own, elderly Dell laptop.

It's running a P4; 1 GB of RAM, and where my own uses integrated graphics, this is using a Mobility Radeon graphics card.....but I don't think that has much bearing on the problem that's reared its head.

He's so far tried 3 Pups from LiveCD, and they all have one thing in common. They load the drivers for disk; search for (and find) the Puppy files; load the main SFS; set-up the layered filesystem.....and then, just after the 'Performing a 'switch root' part of the boot process, they all, without exception, go into a kernel panic....not syncing, etc.

I've never actually encountered this problem myself; my own Pups have always behaved themselves booting from disc. The only time I've hit a snag has been when, like many folks this last 18 months or so, I've encountered the 'can't find the Puppy SFS' problem. 'Dropping out to initial ramdisk console', etc.....

The fact that all three have failed at precisely the same point of the process is kinda reminding me of summat I was looking at on the Forum a few months ago, but I can't remember quite what it was.....

Anybody got any ideas, please? Advice will, as always, be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Mike.

[perdido]

Nah, removed that suggestion, it would still boot.
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Might want to try an older pup on it, such as 4.12 or 4.20

[bigpup]

What Puppy versions have you tried?

Usually the cause of this error when booting from a Puppy live CD could be:

Bad download of the Puppy iso file.

Bad burn of the iso image to the CD (Burned at too high a speed)

The burning program did not burn properly the files to the CD.
If burned using a Windows program. Make sure the file names are in lower case lettering.

Dirt or contamination on the read lens of the CD drive.

Bad CD disk.

Could try:
A legacy version of Puppy Precise.
Lucid Puppy 5.2.8-005
Lucid Puppy Revitalized as 5.2.8.7

[bigpup]

You are using 32bit Puppies?

[Mike Walsh]

Hi, perdido.

Hmm. So it could be that the Pups he's tried are simply too new, d'you think?

I'm just bemused by the fact that they've all quit at exactly the same point. I suppose it must be hardware, then.....although like I said, it's got pretty much the same specs as my old Dell, and she runs Tahr 6.05 with no problems...

Worth a try, I suppose. OK, we'll give it a whirl. Thanks for the suggestion.

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@bigpup:-

I'm suspecting the 'burn', too, I gotta confess. I'm waiting to hear back from him as to what program he actually used. It would be from within Windoze, yes; the 'upper case' problem had occurred to me, too.

I'll ask him what burn speed he used.....and from what he said so far, he's used a DVD, not a CD. I may recommend he gives BurnCDCC a try; it's one we often recommend, mainly 'cos you can't go wrong with it. It only does one thing!

Although the guy's used computers for years, and been a mod on BleepingComputer for a long time, where Linux is concerned he's as green as grass. So he's just like any other 'noob', as far as that goes.

So far we've tried Tahr 6.05, Precise 5.7.1 Retro, and Lucid. Those three seemed best to me, too. I reckon Perdido's suggestion could hold water, too. I'll see what he says, anyway, when he gets back to me.

Apparently, he's installed XP and Win7 to this machine without any problems.....but there, of course, the disk has been prepared for you. You don't need to burn them.

Win7 is too much for it, and he doesn't want to use XP because he considers it to be insecure..... Hence why he's thinking of Linux. And, er....yes. Definitely 32-bitzers!


Mike.

[Fossil]

Mike, Just a suggestion. Fifteen plus years old, eh? Try something closer to the same age as a starter - Puppy 412 or 431 on a CD. Get him to use BurnCDCC.

[Mike Walsh]

Hiya, Fossil.

I come to you from the truly ancient SeaMonkey 1.1.18 in Puppy 431. What is it they say about 'letting sleeping dogs lie', hmm?

I never was all that keen on SeaMonkey.....but this thing is still working, even so..... Mind you, 431 isn't detecting my external USB drive, 'cos it's plugged into a USB 3.0 PCI-e adapter card. Ah, well; can't have everything, I suppose.... Where the hell's the 'Home' button in this thing?

This might do for ye old Sager.....if Roger can get it burnt to disk properly, that is..!!!

We shall see, we shall see....

(*Gawd, the things I do...*)


Mike.

[mikeslr]

Hi Mike,

Regarding BurnCDCC, change your communication from suggest to insist.

I've recently had a curious, similar, but probably unrelated experience. Having rediscovered that I had an Asus eeepc 701sd, I decided to see if I could upgrade its OS from Saluki to something more recent like Tahrpup or Pupjibaro or, if not, even Carolina Vanguard. The fundamental differences between Saluki and Vanguard is that the latter has newer graphic libraries and a newer kernel.

The 701sd doesn't have an optical drive, but can boot from one of its USB-ports. So, serially, I installed the OSes above to a bootable USB-key figuring if they ran from the USB-Key I'd transfer them over to the 701sd. All booted from the USB-Key. But once I copied their files to a folder on the 701sd and added it to its grub4dos menu.lst, both tahrpup and pupjibaro hung without reaching desktop; and Vanguard could not find puppy_vlina_1.3.sfs.

At any rate, the above not being what I considered a vital project, I decided to just upgrade some of Saluki's applications. Principal among those upgrades were the installation of Watchdog's recent openssl [see here, http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 847#943847]; Seamonkey 2.35 which ran OOTB, and (firefox)Light which needed libatomic.so.1, I've provided a pet to install it here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 772#939772.

Which reminds me. I haven't yet gotten around to seeing if its flashplayer can be upgraded: see your post about such.

At any rate, as those upgrades are available to Saluki, perhaps your friend should try it; or Carolina 1.2, or Racy which was the basis for both and for which similar upgrades should work.

mikesLr

[Mike Walsh]

Morning, Mike.

Funny you should say that..! I've recently installed Racy 5.5 to a sub-directory on my 'experimental' partition. I've played about with it a few times over the last couple of years, but never had much joy with it.....until now. (I know a bit more about what I'm doing, now!)

I've accepted that the Chromium-based browsers will not work on it; stat. Glibc's way too old. Having said that, and working around the fact that I just don't like SeaMonkey (never have, never will), I've installed both FF 27 ESR, and QtWeb 3.8.4. That thing simply flies, despite the fact that you can't do anything with it involving SSL certs.

I've got it set up just how I want it now (including a whole lot of Windoze 'portable' apps running under WINE). Like this:-





I'm having a lot of fun with it, TBH! If what you say is true, then it might be worth considering for Roger's machine.....


Mike.

[Mike Walsh]

Evening all.

Well, problem solved. I did 'insist' that he used BurnCDCC.....and it appears to have worked. That, coupled with actually using a CD instead of a re-writable DVD. Maybe the media itself was getting 'worn-out'. Who knows?

Anyway, following using BurnCDCC with a standard CR-R disc, he's now got Tahrpup 6.05 running quite happily on ye olde Sager! So, as bigpup has said to so many people on here over the years, either a bad download.....or (more often the case) a bad 'burn'.

Roger was using ImgBurn in Windoze the first time around with the three Pups I suggested he try. I've tried burning Pup to ISO with ImgBurn back when I was using XP (which is what the Sager was running).....and every time, it failed. I soon sussed out the darn thing was doing what so many Windoze 'burner' apps do; it was changing all the file-names to upper-case, so naturally, Pup wouldn't recognise 'em! Not their fault, of course; they have to work with the standard Windoze APIs......which is why I can't quite understand why BurnCDCC always seems to work.

Ours not to reason why. Tahr's up-and-running, and I'm now helping him to 'fine-tune' things. Another success story for Pup!


Mike.

[8Geee]

I'll toot my own horn, here, and ask the OP to try this one: Slacko5.7-2017A.

Might be old enough to run on that 2001-2 era 'puter

Regards
8Geee

[Mike Walsh]

Mornin', 8Geee.

I might do that, actually. We'll let him get set up & comfortable with Tahrpup first, then I'll suggest about the possibility of running more than one Pup.

Roger's very new to Linux, and I get the impression that he's one of these guys who likes to take things slow & steady, so as to absorb what's going on. So; 'softly, softly, catchee monkee' I think is the best approach.

I'll definitely mention it though. I might even try it on my own elderly Dell; it's around the same vintage, and has pretty much the same hardware setup, with the exception of that Mobility Radeon graphics card.

I'll let you know how I get on with it. Cheers.


Mike.