Boot Puppy on USB Flashdrive plugged into eePC

[ayekamark]

Hello All. I am an experienced Win user (or perhaps I should say "prisoner"), limited Linux user, but wanting more.

I have truly searched the forum but have not found an answer: I want to have my own Puppy OS and data files on a USB flash drive that I can boot from on my wife's ASUS eePC. Yes, I know that Linux is already on the eePC, but I have promised my wife I will limit my use of her machine to ONLY operations on my 4GB flash drive, dedicated to acting like a Puppy partition. Progress so far:
1. I HAVE downloaded Puppy and HAVE burned an *.iso to a CD-WORM, and have re-booted my office desktop computer using the CD. Worked great.
2. While no forum discussions directly instructed to do so, I stumbled into creating a personal storage file on my intended flash drive. I allow Puppy to copy files from the CD onto the flash drive and have >500 MB of files currently on the flash drive.

Here are the problems:
A. How do I make the flash drive bootable, particularly on the eePC
B. How do I tell either the eePC or any other PC to boot from the flash drive?

I leave on an extended trip in 3 days, so any quick help is coveted.

Thanks Much!

[Jaybekay]

Check out Pupeee. It's based on 3.01 and works well on a flash drive.

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=25896

I have it installed on an SD card that is always in our eeepc

[ayekamark]

Thanks for responding so quickly Jaybekay. To ensure that we have communicated, you have NOT replaced the OEM Linux on the eePC and are using Pupee on the SD as your OS, correct? If so, how do you allow Pupee to take control of the already booted eePC and operate with no influence on the "normal" operation of the eePC when you intend to have the eePC work like it did out of the box?

[Jaybekay]

Yep - to use Pupeee I press esc and tell it to boot from the SD card. Unless I do that, it goes directly to the Xandros OS

Just found out about DingoPlus for eeepc (I'm a little out of the loop) based on Puppy 4.0 I haven't tried it, but I'm sure it works just fine too.

http://www.puppylinux.org/downloads/puplets/dingoplus

To get Puppy on a flash drive or SD card I burn the .iso to CD, boot from that on my desktop, and use the universal installer to install to flash drive or SD card. I think some people know how to install without burning a CD, but the old fashioned way works for me

[Jaybekay]

Well, I'm feeling verbose, so maybe I'll go on a little more. Feel free to ignore me! I like using the SD card because the eeepc is so small a flash drive looks enormous sticking out the side.

And by putting Puppy on the SD card that is always in the eeepc, there is always 2 OS... just in case. I hear that the SSD hard drive in the eeepc either works or it doesn't... there isn't anything like a bad sector on a SSD hard drive. Once an area is corrupted, the whole hard drive is inaccessible. Thankfully, it hasn't happened to me, but that's what I've heard. But if you have Puppy on the SD, no worried (apart from lost data) because Puppy doesn't need a hard drive... brilliance courtesy Barry K.

I've got Puppy on a flash drive that I carry with me, just in case I need to use a relatives virus infested XP PC that I can plug into the eeepc if need be. So I guess, a lot of the time I have 3 OS's with me. Maybe you could put DingoPlus on an SD and Pupeee on your flash drive for triple redundancy. If you have another flash drive, you could put Breeezy on it (a Puppy 2.14? version with all the eeepc drivers) then you have quadruple redundancy just like the space shuttle!

Lots more good info on the eeepc here ------> http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewforum.php?id=15

And I use the storage file mostly for Puppy programs and settings. Any files, music, etc. I keep on a folder on the SD card so I can access it from either OS. Basically, only Puppy can see the info in the storage file.

Good luck and have fun with Puppy and the eeepc. They're both great.

[raffy]

Just remember two points:

1. Each Puppy version saves to pup_save.2fs by default. Newer versions generally ask the user to save to a different-named file (like pup_saveNONAME.2fs, for example), so you can actually keep multiple save files. At boot time, Puppy stops to ask which save file to use if it finds more than one save file.

2. Puppy will keep looking for save file in the flash disk as long as it finds "PMEDIA=usbflash" in syslinux.cfg (in newer Puppy versions, this is no longer capitalized: use "pmedia=usbflash").

Assuming that the USB/SD flash is already bootable, the way I use it for different versions is this:
- use another PC or OS to rename
* vmlinuz to vmlinuz.XXX (XXX = version number or name of puplet)
* initrd.gz to initrd.XXX ( - ditto- )
- copy the new files vmlinuz, initrd.gz, pup_xxx.sfs and zdrv_xxx.sfs to the SD/USB flash (however, if the puplet is eee-optimized, you can leave out zdrv_xxx.sfs). Note that xxx = version number of the puplet.

Final caution: You can't play with the Puppy's file names (pup_save and pup_xxx.sfs, especially) IF you are using them (the clear sign is that you can't unmount the CD/USB flash). To be able to play with Puppy file names, add "pfix=ram" in syslinux.cfg and reboot. Do file maintenance [see above] and before rebooting, delete "pfix=ram" from syslinux.cfg.