(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hi Team,

Can I boot my Puppy from a USB drive, if its pupsave moved/copied to hd ? Does SB knows a script to it, or - better - a bootcode probably ?

Thanks.

Yeah you can do that without a boot code. Just boot Puppy normally and it will search all your drives for Pup_save.files. If you have more than one you usually get the option to choose which one to load. If you only have one Pup_save.file then it will automatically load that, even if it is on a different device to the one you're using to boot. There are pmedia boot codes, I use one for my full install, not sure if they work for Frugals, but I don't think you'll need them.

I've never done it, but I think plenty of people in this forum have. I believe it depends on whether your BIOS can boot from USB. If it can't, the boot process must begin from the CD or floppy drive, but it can be transferred to the external drive from there.

I notice someone reporting a problem on the forum that may be caused by this.
Loading Puppy from a USB Flash Drive.

i.e. The pupsave may be on sda2, to which he cannot then gain access to view the folder/file content.

Just boot Puppy normally and it will search all your drives for Pup_save.files.

Not on my frugal install. It just finds save files on the drive that the install is on. I presume you are talking about booting from CD... or maybe it varies between Puppy versions.

I've never done it, but I think plenty of people in this forum have. I believe it depends on whether your BIOS can boot from USB.

Only if you want to put the whole install on there, although if the bios doesn't support it you can still boot using a wakepup floppy or something.
If you want to boot from CD or whatever and just load the save file from USB you don't need BIOS support.

Hi Team, thank you for replies.

Flash, I have UDB-HDD on BIOS, and it boots well.

As to me personally, I put all booties on [flash sda]1 and pupsave+mainFS on [flash sda]2. It gives (among some benefits) the option to mount sda1 inside Puppy, play with syslinux.cfg, unmount PROPERLY, then reboot and never get a "boot error" in my whole life.

It interests me why I see the absence of a default pupsave search beyond flashdisk area during boot. It was unexpected and for me unaccepted lack of a feature.

So if I intend to boot from USB to a pupsave on HD (as, say, I come home and want to work faster on HD session, and my special bootcodes placed on flashdrive) it cannot do that. I need a solution for it. Where ? and if not a complete solution, maybe an environment to search for it ??

I have been able to copy the initrd.gz, vmlinuz and pup_xxx.sfs files to my laptop's hard drive, then boot up using a USB flash drive containing only grub. It works when menu.lst has no bootcodes included (no pfix= or psubdir= etc.), and lists all pupsave-xxx.2fs files for me to choose from.

Hmmm . . . I may have had to keep the .2fs files and the pup_xxx.sfs files on the root of their drive partition, though. I can't remember offhand.

Don't know how syslinux does it, but I hope this gives some clues.

Thanks,

My experience with GRUB is not so good because of repeating troubles in fixing and modifying (challenging myself and fail over and over, partialy solved in syslinux-use as mentioned former post). However I've made some progress in another direction so maybe I'll try GRUB again in some stage, I'm not confident. Thanks anyway. I'm still waiting for a bootcode.

One issue I know is the hard disk partition is NTFS and it is "unclean" (needs disk check in Windows). If that happens, Puppy sees it as read-only (will not write to it).