How to install Puppy to a new hard disk drive?

[2Sassy]

Hi I'm 2Sassy and I new to Linux.

I have plans to upgrade a Compaq Presario 5050 Desktop with a 333MHz PII Celeron to it's max 256 RAM and 30GB (new) hard drive. I've also just ordered New Puppy 3.1 distro and I plan for Puppy to be my only OS. I have questions: Will Puppy format the hard drive for me? I'm worry sick about drivers and BIOS, will I have to find this data from some place? As of now my desktop is blank, Win98 says my certification key isn't valid, though I have the # they gave me when I bought the software ..... Will this be an issue? Thanks for any assistance you can give me.

Sassy

[dansolo]

Hello 2Sassy.

First of all wellcome to the forum.
I'm sorry about my poor english (I' speak spanish).


I' have a similar pentium II (330mhz) with 256 ram in my atelier since some years. The machine works very good using 800x600x16 (or low) in xvesa video setup (this is one of the video's setup posible in the original puppy). In some cases, with grafics programs, i'use 640x480, because the 330 mhz pentium procesor don't have an excelent performance respect my spects. But is my case, you have to see it in your case.

The 256mb of ram is excelent for puppy, else 128, and in some cases can run with 64 (but in special cases or whit puppy derivates that are more light).

You can try all the puppy enviroment just runing in ram memory, (in fact you can work this way if you want, for the rest of your life ). And you can search the forum and the puppy home page, and see that you have a minimum of 2 instalation options (frugal and complete). Then you will choose your tao.

Puppy have an excelent and easy grafic tool to formating and creating partitions in hard drives (the program's name is Gparted).

The drivers problem is a very old problem for linux users , but i' think that puppy can provide all necesary driver for your machine, and in case that not, you can search the solution in a special post, providing all the information posible in the special case, of the special driver's problem.

So, to finish, perhaps the easy way will be: First run the puppyOS directly in ram, study the OS, read the help that Barry writed in it (is a lot and simple) See if you have driver's problems AFTER setup all.
Then, study the optimus way that you want, to format and partition that 30 gb hard drive.

I sugest you, study the sections of this forum, to do optimus searchs and posts.

Perhaps this can help you



What is that you call gate98 ??????????? A militar gate???????????????
Wath is a certification key ???????????? Some gastronomic specification for food?????????????

[oblivious]

Will Puppy format the hard drive for me? I'm worry sick about drivers and BIOS, will I have to find this data from some place?

Don't worry, you'll be able to format your new drive. (I'm not sure how as I don't have puppy 3.01 running so can't check at the moment). The thing with Puppy is that it will run from the cd, without the hard disk. So when you have your disk, you can start it up and have a look before you need to worry about getting your disk formatted.

The BIOS is stored on the motherboard on the computer, you don't need to worry about that, Puppy doesn't go near it. A lot of hardware will just work on Puppy, you don't need to find drivers to get it to work. If you've got something that doesn't work, come back and ask about it with full details and somebody will try to help you.

So, at this stage, I'd suggest just sticking your cd in the cd drive, starting your computer and seeing what happens. If it works, you'll be able to figure out how to do the things you need, but there's no rush to do it before Puppy will work.

(I'm not sure what's going on with Win98, is that on an old drive, or have you tried to reinstall Win98 on your new drive? It shouldn't matter though - you can just reformat and it'll be gone)

[2Sassy]

Hello 2Sassy.

First of all wellcome to the forum.
I'm sorry about my poor english (I' speak spanish).
I sugest you, study the sections of this forum, to do optimus searchs and posts.

What is that you call gate98 ??????????? A militar gate???????????????
Wath is a certification key ???????????? Some gastronomic specification for food?????????????

Thank you for the warm welcome dansolo your English is just fine. I had the privilege of visiting Buenos Aries three years ago I enjoyed my stay and hope to return someday; believe my Spanish isn't as good as your English. Thanks for the advice. I'm definitely going to take your suggested and I'm sure I'll have more questions.

My Regards,
Sassy

[2Sassy]

Will Puppy format the hard drive for me? I'm worry sick about drivers and BIOS, will I have to find this data from some place?

Don't worry, you'll be able to format your new drive. (I'm not sure how as I don't have puppy 3.01 running so can't check at the moment). The thing with Puppy is that it will run from the cd, without the hard disk. So when you have your disk, you can start it up and have a look before you need to worry about getting your disk formatted.

The BIOS is stored on the motherboard on the computer, you don't need to worry about that, Puppy doesn't go near it. A lot of hardware will just work on Puppy, you don't need to find drivers to get it to work. If you've got something that doesn't work, come back and ask about it with full details and somebody will try to help you.

So, at this stage, I'd suggest just sticking your cd in the cd drive, starting your computer and seeing what happens. If it works, you'll be able to figure out how to do the things you need, but there's no rush to do it before Puppy will work.

(I'm not sure what's going on with Win98, is that on an old drive, or have you tried to reinstall Win98 on your new drive? It shouldn't matter though - you can just reformat and it'll be gone)

Thanks oblivious for taking the time to assist me, I don't feel so anxious now. Actually I'm in a holding pattern ..... waiting for Brown/UPS to deliver my Puppy software, RAM, and Hard Drive. I'll read up look at forums tutorials. I'm sure I'll be back with more questions. Thanks!

Sassy

[puppyluv]

Will Puppy format the hard drive for me? I'm worry sick about drivers and BIOS, will I have to find this data from some place? As of now my desktop is blank, Win98 says my certification key isn't valid, though I have the # they gave me when I bought the software ..... Will this be an issue? Thanks for any assistance you can give me.

Hi 2Sassy,

I haven't installed Puppy on a laptop such as yours but I have installed 3.01 on a desktop and the instructions are very easy and the process is quite smooth.

I would suggest playing with it through Live-CD first though just to get the feel. Then you can do a complete install and yes, it will format for you. That's what I did. I did a complete install and not the frugal.

Just follow the prompts and if you run into something of feel you're getting stuck along the way, this forum is great for support.

[harryh]

I wrote a simpel instruktion about how I installed my Puppy (2.16) on a clean harddrive. You can find it on
http://www.sitatata.com/Sitatataeng/ .

I’m very pleased with it, everything is funktioning fine. The only complaint I have is the browser Sea Monky. Well it’s Ok but too heavy for my old laptop, so I use Opera instead.

Good Luck to You!

[alienjeff]

Glad to hear you're maxing out the RAM. That will make all the difference in the world with that vintage machine. As for Puppy v3.01, you'd be better off doing a full HD install than frugal - strictly in consideration of the comparative memory footprints of both methods.

I'll be curious to see how you make out with video in v3.01, too. Keep us posted.

[yellowdog]

Hi, been at this all day and am getting nowhere. (i've been to the satatat website, didn't find answers to this)
Goal is to get Puppy working on a Pentium 3, 500mhz with 194mb ram and 6gb hd, without the boot cd. (I don't want to share the hd with another OS and I don't want booting to be dependant upon the existence of a livecd.)
System works fine with LiveCD but using universal Installer it hangs. It didn't like the winXP at first, so, using Gparted I made one large partition and dumped the XP. Installer didn't like that, kept failing over swap partion. So I made a swap, partition. Still didn't like it. So then I tried cfdisk. Made hda1 to be 100mb Linux, hda2 400mb as swap and hda3 as ext3 rest of drive. Everything seemed to work till I tried re-booting without CD, boot process would stop at boot from cd... Okay, then I tried using Gparted again, made a 200mb ext3 for hda1, 400mb swap for hda2 and rest ext3 hda3. Installer put grub on the mbr and boot files in hda1, then while re-booting Puppy wanted to save stuff so I told it to use hda3. Then during the next boot grub came up and wouldn't work on the Linux in hda1, so then i tried the choice for hda3 given in grub, still wouldn't work. Checking with cfdisk, hda1 was showing no boot flag, so I made it bootable, booting again grub failed again. Re-ran universal installer again, re-boot again, system still won't boot from hd.

What is the partition type and sizing that Puppy wants? And do I need to remove Grub and start over? Gparted doesn't seem to have a boot partition setting that I could find, does it do this automagically? And once I've partitioned, where should I go to format the partitions or is this also automatic?

[alienjeff]

Here's what I'd suggest:

Boot from CD with the boot parameter: puppy pfix=ram

Run gparted

Make a 192M swap partition (this will be hda1)

Make a 3G ext2 partition - use gparted's "manage flags" to flag this partition "boot" (this will be hda2)

Make an ext2 partition with the remainder of the drive (this will be hda3 - a spare partition for either storage or testing another version of Puppy at a later date)

Have gparted perform these changes to drive

exit gparted

open a console

type: mkswap /dev/hda1

type: mke2fs /dev/hda2

type: mke2fs /dev/hda3

Now you are ready to run the Universal Installer

With that box of yours, do a full HD install to hda2. Trust me.

When it's time for installing Grub, install Grub to the MBR.

If you follow these instructions, you should be able to boot from your HD just fine.

[yellowdog]

At boot after it trys to boot from cd it says grub loading stage 1.5
then it says grub loading, please wait....
Error 18

Any idea what this means? (means I messed up somewhere)

[yellowdog]

I think I may have a handle on this, be awhile though before I know for sure

[yellowdog]

Alienjeff!!!
You fixed it! Do you know if your method is the usual way to get Puppy installed or is it just peculiar to a certain type of pc? I'd like to use this on several installs.

My error problem turned out to be an odd choice in the bios. HD was set to user with wrong settings. Gparted had the model right but total capacity wrong. cfdisk was a little closer. Well, it's booting now. Probably need to replace the battery.

Really appreciate the help!

[alienjeff]

I forgot which version it was, but I had problems with partitions being recognized by the universal installer. What appeared to be happening was the partitions were indeed made, but gparted didn't initialize (for lack of a better word) the file systems. So after several days of beating my head against the wall, I decided to run mkswap and mke2fs after partitioning.

As for the partition numbers and sizes, I have used boxes with similar sized HDs and like to experiment. So that "extra" partition I suggested is for when you want to test another version of Puppy or other mini-distro.

With the amount of RAM in your computer, the "1X" swap partition size "rule," or more accurately general consensus, applied.

Glad to have been some help. I've had others walk me through problems, so this is just one way we give something back. Have fun!

[yellowdog]

Hi Alienjeff:
I kind of like this distro. Been playing with a few other ones, but this one sure brings to life an older computer, and seems to be relatively easy to use.

Am wondering though, is adding users supported in this distro? It doesn't have me log in at startup and I seem to have root privileges all the time with no password.

That would be okay if I didn't have it on a network or internet, but kind of worrisome while attached.

I've got an even older system I'm going to put Puppy on next. This Puppy even told me I have an LS-120 drive, I thought it was a floppy till I looked closer. (computer was a gift and didn't know what was on it)

[Béèm]

I work as root from the beginning and never had a problem from connecting to the internet.

This is not a Windows product.

[yellowdog]

Hey Beem,
But it has a windows manager! Just kidding! Of course it's not a Gate$$$ product, I wouldn't have downloaded and tried it out if it was. But even so, without some security measures in place, even Linux/Unix is vulnerable to malware and crackers!

It is refreshing to be able to just turn on the computer and start using it, but that is only good if it's not connected to a network or the internet.

I need to find out more about the built-in security Puppy has, could be I'm just worrying over nothing.

How does local mail work though if I can't login as a typical user? Or is Puppy really meant to function as a stand-alone system?