Unable to boot Xenialpup64 CE 7.5 from USB(Solved)

[heywoodj]

I'm trying out different Puppies on a Lenovo G585 laptop (1300MHz 2 core., 8 GB RAM) originally dual booting Win8 and Fatdog64-620 through refind, now with the addition of Bionicpup64 8.0 frugally installed.

This, being an UEFI machine, only allows USB boot by going into the "BIOS"
(the UEFI?) and changing the boot to "Legacy Support" and disabling "Secure Boot". I have a 16 GB USB flash drive freshly formatted to fat32 with GParted to which I installed bionicpup64-8, bionicpup32-8, xenialpup64-7.5, and xenial-7.0.6(32bit) through the use of isobooter.

Of the four pups, only xenialpup64-7.5 fails to boot, the dialogue going like so:

Code: Select all

Booting xenialpup64-7.5-efi

Decompressing Linux...   Parsing ELF...   done!
Booting the kernel

             v
             v
             v
             v 

*** xenialpup64 7.5   Linux 4.9.58 [x86_64] ***
Loading the 'puppy_xenialpup64_7.5.sfs' main file... copying to ram

mount: mounting /dev/loop0 on /pup_ro2 failed: Invalid argument       failed

Dumping last lines of /tmp/bootinit.log...
4: ONE_PART=sda7
4: ONE_PART=sda8
5: ONE_PART=sda8 PSUBDIR= P_BP_FN= P_DEF_FN=puppy_xenialpup64_7.5.sfs
6: ONE_PART=SDA8 ONE_TRY_FN=/puppy_xenial64_7.5.sfs PDRV=sda8,vfat,/puppy_xenialpup64_7.5.sfs
Dumping last lines of kernel log...
psmouse serio1: elantech: assuming hardware version 3 (with firmware version 0x450f02)
psmouse serio1: elantech: Synaptics capabilities query result 0x078, 0x17, 0x0b.
psmouse serio1: elantech: Elan sample query result 04, 3d, 85
input: ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input9
Pausing for 60 seconds...
Loading puppy main sfs file.                                          failed
Dumping last lines of /tmp/bootinit.log...
4: ONE_PART=sda7
4: ONE_PART=sda8
5: ONE_PART=sda8 PSUBDIR= P_BP_FN= P_DEF_FN=puppy_xenialpup64_7.5.sfs
6: ONE_PART=SDA8 ONE_TRY_FN=/puppy_xenial64_7.5.sfs PDRV=sda8,vfat,/puppy_xenialpup64_7.5.sfs
Dumping last lines of kernel log...
psmouse serio1: elantech: assuming hardware version 3 (with firmware version 0x450f02)
psmouse serio1: elantech: Synaptics capabilities query result 0x078, 0x17, 0x0b.
psmouse serio1: elantech: Elan sample query result 04, 3d, 85
input: ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input9
*** sda8 /puppy_xenial64_7.5.sfs mount of sfs failed.	
*** Error is too critical, dropping out to console...
*** To save debug info to a partition, type 'debugsave' 

I can successfully boot this xenialpup64 on my other laptop (hp nx6325, 1600 MHz 2 core, 4 GB) using the same USB so the install is probably okay.

Any ideas on dealing with this "mount: mounting /dev/loop0 on /pup_ro2 failed: Invalid argument failed" problem?

(Some might be saying "sda8! WTF?". I assure you this machine in its original Win8 configuration came with 8 partitions, to which I added sda9. I'm paranoid that with UEFI, wiping the disk could make it totally unbootable so they remain. The "refind" is a remnant of the Fatdog install. Again, changing to grub4dos seemed risky)

[enrique]

I hope it is not UEFI related as I have no experience on it.

Most likely a kernel issue or wrong partition on grub menu.

Your nx6325 has RS485 that uses ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 chipset release date May 23, 2006.

It is possible that that kernel was not build with the appropriate hardware requirements. To simplify answer, If the kernel can not see the partition, it can not mounted then, so it can not load the sfs files required.

So when you boot next time, try to get in to promt. Then 1rst thing check your partitions

ls /dev/sd*

If you see your disk then try to manually mount to see if you can access your sfs. You claim you created sda9. Lets assume sda9 is your Puppy.

mkdir -p /mnt/sda9
mount /dev/sda9 /mnt/sda9
ls /mnt/sda9

Now lets talk about the other fact. You claim you created sda9 but that history only mention sda8? Why? What is your grub,cfg menu?

[heywoodj]

Boy, am I embarrassed! enrique, you helped me see what the messages were saying, that it was seeing .sfs files in sda8, which should not have been there. They should have been only on sdb1, the USB drive. EXCEPT that I had been playing with a "cheat frugal" install when one of the other system was running and I had copied of .sfs files there which confused things during boot.

By booting with another system and deleting the offending files from sda8, I can now boot fully to desktop. Woohoo! Now onto the next problem.

Thank you. I'm marking this "Solved".