How to: Boot Puppy from USB on mini-itx epia-pd

[nzstubee]

Hello, I have just overcome an 'issue' with the above board that might be useful to others trying to do the same.

I recently made up a mini pc with a 1Ghz epia-pd mini-itx motherboard from via. The machine has 512MB ram and I purchased a 'generic' 128MB flash disk to boot it with. The mother board has 2 ethernet ports, 6 usb 2.0, 4 serial, 1 parrallel, 2 ide and ps2 connectors for mouse/keyboard. (I purchased from pp.co.nz for you nzers reading).
The memory stick is a Jetflash from transcend - i.e. generic!

Anyway, it was relatively easy to get the usb flash to boot, followed Barry's 'old' instructions and used syslinux 3.11 and later also tried the setup tool from inside puppy from cd-boot. (bios set to boot usb-hdd or usb-zip as first boot device).

But the issue was - it would hang half way through the device initialisation with the following:

USB Mass storage support registered.
usb storage device replies async, need to sleep 25 secs....
hub.c: new USB device 00:10.3-6, assigned address 2


By going into the bios and 'disabling' assign a irq to the usb I'd still get a failure with the following:

usb_control/bulk_msg:timeout

Then X wouldn't start and no user files. Booting from a CD-rom would also get similar results i.e it wouldn't be able to load the usb stick as a user store location.

Anyway - the answer is - in the bios under 'Integrated Peripherals'
'Super IO Device'
Change the 'Onboard Parallel Port' to 'Disabled'

All other settings as per 'optimized defaults'. Then puppy loads fine from usb stick (off any usb port) and from cd using the usb as user memory store. (cd load is much faster than usb 2.0 load)

Don't know why this problem exists - any guru out there with ideas? I hope this at least helps someone frustrated with the above problem.

) Stu

errata: even though no issues on startup - files 'saved' during puppy session are not being written to the usb. Is there a 'flush' button or something?

[nzstubee]

opps,

saving working fine, just not 'transferrable' between cd boot and usb boot. - different 'pup' files - one called pup100 the other pup001

[aahhaaa]

Hi Stub- Congrats on living in NZ!

I've got an Epia too- M10000. However I'm rural and must use a dial-up connection. That's always been my stumbling block... so aggravatin' to reload Winders just to download a component.

Looks like you are making serious progress. What do you intend your machine to do?

[nzstubee]

I am actually intending a mini server for data archive, vpn, intranet etc, but I think the idea of having the 'core os' readonly and 'managed' via a cd-rom set is much easier to cope with (esp with miltiple boxes) than std installs. (I am one of those noobees that finds the nux directory structure horribly confusing.) Anyway, it is much easier to tell someone to 'push the on button and put the cd in the drive' than try and talk them through a full install!

Good luck with the dialup, I abandoned that here as I'm sure it is deliberately bandwidth limited below its capability. And evidently many programmers seem to have forgotten the vast majority of users aren't using 'super computers' like theirs!!