No /boot/vmlinuz after HD install

[enwent]

A friend just gave me an old Pentium 75 with 40mb of memory, and I'd like to set it up with Puppy for my kids; I figure if it won't run Puppy, it won't run anything. The live CD works, albeit quite slowly. I hoped Puppy would run faster from the hard-drive, but I'm having trouble installing it.

I've partitioned the hard disk with 400mb for swap (since memory is so short) and the rest ext3. Installation runs nominally until I'm configuring GRUB; then the CD ejects spontaneously and a dialog opens that asks if I want to proceed with GRUB setup or abort. I say go ahead, and momentarily the same dialog opens again. I can't get past this point. Maybe Puppy is running out of room to work, although the taskbar display doesn't show it. Whatever the reason, this same thing has happened at exactly the same point during three consecutive attempts at installation.

So, I reboot the machine from the live CD and run grubconfig from there. I can install GRUB this way, but the system still won't boot; it hangs with a GRUB Error 15: file not found. Sure enough, when I boot again from the live CD and mount /dev/hda1, there's no /boot directory in /. Does the installer create /boot/vmlinuz after it sets up GRUB?

I really want to introduce my kids to Linux, and I find Puppy much more appealing and accessible than DSL or even Feather (whose HD install has problems of its own). I could just run Puppy live, but I hoped it would run faster from the hard drive. Has anyone seen this problem, or can someone suggest a workaround? I'm at a dead end.

[MU]

No idea why the installer failed, but you could continue manually running Puppy from CD.
Did grub create a file menu.lst ?

It should contain the lines that boot the kernel.
Just look at them, and copy those files (vmlinuz and initrd.gz) from the CD to the folder listed in menu.lst.

Also copy pup_214.sfs and zdrv_214.sfs to the harddisk, these two must go to "/", the top directory.

Mark

[EdFromHouston]

Well if it is puppy 2.14 then it should be ext2. Also 400mb of swap seems too much to me when you only have 40mb of ram, 100 to maybe 150 would work better I think. Too much could burn up your old hard drive. I'd change that first IMO.

[Bruce B]

My feeling is you should try the install once or twice more. Nobody, seems to know what went wrong. Including me.

An ext2 filesystem is faster and I'd use it for that reason alone.

Also, I'd install GRUB on the MBR - if I remember right and I think I do, Puppy's install recommends against this??

In any event that IS where I'd put GRUB on the MBR

EDIT PS: choose an option 2 install

[EdFromHouston]

I thought grub should be installed with the grub installer in the menu of puppys live cd.

[mouldy]

I've had simular problem. I dont know why its necessary, but on type2 install (and on old system such as yours, a type 2 "normal" install is way to go), I've found that if I move /boot/vmlinuz to /vmlinuz, then change line in /boot/grub/menu.1st that calls Puppy to reflect this. This is example from my Grub menu file:

# Linux bootable partition config begins
title Puppy Linux 2.14(on /dev/hda2)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda2 ro vga=normal
# Linux bootable partition config ends

Then everything works whereas if I leave /vmlinuz in the /boot directory, then Puppy may only sometimes boot or not boot at all. Please note the above is only suggesting the change for vmlinuz, you shouldn't copy my other lines as you may use different partition than me to run Puppy. Also some computers it works better with vga=normal rather than what Grub installer comes up with.

[mouldy]

I thought grub should be installed with the grub installer in the menu of puppys live cd.

Grub installer should come up automatically when using Puppy Universal Installer script. But you also can boot from live cd and click: Menu, System, Grub bootloader config.

And for all it matters, back before Puppy had Grub, I installed Grub using Mepis live cd. Matter of fact the version in Mepis even offered the option to customize Grub with my own background picture. But since Puppy has included Grub installer, it works fine and less hassle.

[mouldy]

I dont think it matters great deal the size of your swap partition. Wouldnt think though that anything over 200mb would do you any further good, just take up hardrive space. Something between 100mb and 200mb would be plenty. And you could go smaller than that if hardrive space is at a premium like on some very old sytems.

[enwent]

Well, I'm getting closer, but still can't boot Puppy. Thank you, MU: creating a folder called /boot and copying vmlinuz and initrd.gz into it (as well as copying the .sfs files to the / directory) got me past the GRUB error. Alas, now the boot process ends in a kernel panic:

Kernel panic - not syncing. No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

So now - thank you, mouldy - I'll try moving vmlinuz up one level and editing the menu file so GRUB looks for it there. And thank you, Ed, for suggesting that I use ext2 rather than ext3; I didn't know that the former is faster, but this poor machine needs all the help it can get. I've never seen more than 100mb of swap in use, but decided to err large because I have 6gb of hard disk and very little RAM to work with. I have to put Smart BootManager on the MBR, because otherwise I can't boot from CD -- the BIOS doesn't support it. So Smart hands off to GRUB on the root superblock, and as far as I can tell that part of the process works perfectly.

[muggins]

enwent,

so vmlinuz & initrd.gz are now in /boot directory? could you post a copy of your
/boot/grub/menu.lst file?

[John Doe]

This thread might help:

"How to run Puppy on 75mhz with 40 megs of EDO RAM"

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=15946

[MU]

your Puppy entry might look like this:

Code: Select all

title Puppy 214

        rootnoverify (hd0,0)

        kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 PMODE=idehd

        initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd.gz

Mark