How to boot Puppy from zip drive?

[Mike Easter]

I have a system whose bios can be configured to boot from cdrom or zip or floppy or hdd, but the puppy4 cd fails on that optical drive and I get a booting from cd - failure message. That same puppy cd boots on several other computers without problems.

My target is to boot from the zip drive. I created a wakepup boot floppy from wkpup202.zip and booted from the floppy and got into puppy4 on the cd^1, but I'm having a problem installing puppy onto the zip. Puppy's universal installer just 'stops' installing without any alerts. It halts/ stops progress/ at the same stage each time, and I've run it numerous times in case it will succeed where it has failed before.

The working sequence after starting the universal installer and after checking the condition of the zip with gparted and that it is unmounted in the mount wizard is -1- insert media now - internal zip or ls120 -2- choose which drive hdd iomega zip 100 atapi ok -3- here is what puppy has found out about the chosen drive hdd4 vfat size 95.98 MiB install puppy hdd4 ok -4- you have chosen to install puppy to partition /dev/hdd4 which has a vfat file system - press ok - there wil be one or two more dialog windows

That's the last thing I see except for the fact that the zip drive light comes on for about 10 sec. I can restart the universal installer over and over and the same sequence unfolds. If something is crashing, there isn't any clue about it.

^1 there is intermittently a problem finding the cd. Besides the problem with the boot from cd failure, the wakepup floppy also fails to find the cd approximately a third of the time and lands back at an A: prompt. I just keep running autoexec and also exercising the manual eject/insert cd until floppy 'takes' and finds the init.

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Mike Easter

[disciple]

I know this doesn't address the problem, but there was recently a discussion of the zip install on Barry's blog, and the general consensus was that it is so slow to boot from zip that it isn't really worth the bother.