Can't load from USB, sfs not found

[PeterRJG]

I know there's a thread about this, but I've followed it and nothing there seems to help with what's going on.

I can create a CD fine, boot into a CD fine. I'd rather do things with the USB stick as it has 16Gb rather than 4.7Gb to play with.

I boot with the CD, start up slacko puppy and use the Boot Flash app to make a bootable USB stick. Works fine, and everything (AFAIK) gets loaded on the USB as I have the iso handy.

I reboot, it boots but bombs out with puppy_slacko_5.4.sfs not found and drops me to the console.

The file is there on the stick and it's called that, puppy_slacko_5.4.sfs, not something else or in upper case or whatever. It's spelled correctly. So it's not a dash/underscore issue.

I changed the line in syslinux.cfg from pmedia=usbflash to pmedia=usbhd (as my laptop calls my stick a USB HDD in the BIOS). Same story, still bombs out with a file not found issue.

Would love to get this going, so any help would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Peter

[rcrsn51]

New Puppies are supposed to be better at locating their core files. But on some hardware, they seem to have gotten worse.

Have you read here? The final solution was to copy the sfs file onto the hard drive.

[PeterRJG]

Yep, that's what I ended up doing - copying the sfs to c:\. Worked like a charm. Couple of things - if I add any further sfs modules, do I need to put them in c:\ too, or can they go on the USB stick? And secondly, what do you think is causing the sfs not to be found on the USB? Is it a typo or something in a script somewhere that's easily fixable or is the root cause of this a little more complex?

Thanks for your help.
Peter

[rcrsn51]

This may be a timing issue. Other distros, like Fatdog, have a "waitusb" option to handle the problem.

[bigpup]

I add any further sfs modules, do I need to put them in c:\ too, or can they go on the USB stick?

They should work OK if you put them on the USB stick.

[DavidSpector]

I'd like to try using this fix, but I don't understand it. I wish the assumed details were here for newcomers like me. "SFS not found" is weird when the SFS file is right there on the USB flash drive. But clearly, if I move it to the Windows file system (in the C: folder), booting to USB is not going to look there or find it. Am I supposed to edit a file on the USB drive to make this work?

If there is a good solution to this "SFS not found" problem, why is it not shouted to the heavens? Where is the central repository of all Help for puppy?

Sorry, I am a complete newcomer and overwhelmed. I've tried many "puppy pfix" commands and none work. And each time I have to reboot twice to get back to the flash drive.

So frustrating to be trying to do this at Christmas!

I know the answer: it's my fault.

The file syslinux.cfg contains the line

append initrd=initrd.gz pmedia=cd

which I changed to:

append initrd=initrd.gz pmedia=usbflash

but it still doesn't work.