Boot With No Mounts Possible?

[jameskinds]

Hi there,

I was wondering if it is possible to boot Puppy (possibly with a cheat code) such that it does not mount any drives on the host system. Alternatively if it does mount drives, that it mounts them in a read only mode.

The reason for this is that I would like a way to boot Puppy on a host system safe in the knowledge that it is not possible for me to (even accidentally) make any changes to the data on the host system.

Thank in advance.

James.

[sunburnt]

Hi jameskinds; Booting from USB or CD-DVD only mounts those drives, unless Puppy's been told to use a Save file or partition on a drive.
For CD-DVD a H.D. or USB is needed for the user's Home or Save drive.

Puppy runs in memory if there's enough & so after booting a Save drive's only needed if you want to save files or program configurations.

[Bruce B]

Puppy's default behavior is to search most media. If it finds a pup_save file, it will mount the host partition and use that save_file

To prevent this, at the 5sec delay type puppy pfix=ram

In either case Puppy will activate any swap partitions it finds.

[HairyWill]

In the case of pfix=ram.

I think it is unlikely that any partitions ever get mounted r/w but I think some will get mounted r/o in a search for a pup_401.sfs file or similar. If your machine does not have enough RAM to load the pup_401.sfs file into memory then the partition will remain mounted (r/o I think).

If you need to absolutely certain then you will need to unpack initrd.gz and check the init script.

There are reports that the latest release candidate copies the pup_411.sfs file from CD to HDD without asking when you first shutdown. I have not tried to verify this behaviour.

[Bruce B]

Will,

I haven't verified all situations. Actually, don't want or intend to. I merely discovered bad behavior.

Wanted to upgrade a 3.01 pup_save to 4.10. I had saved the 3.01 pup_save with the fill_partition option. Seemed an OK thing to do. Why would I expect Puppy wouldn't maintain backward compatibility with that one? Would you?

Naturally if one uses the fill_partition there is not much free space. 4.10 cares less. It copied the pup_410.sfs file to the nearly full partition, truncated the file, and then used the truncated file in it's pathetic attempt to upgrade the pup_save file. (there was a fine one on the cd that could have been used)

I pulled the plug, performed a postmortem, faced the obvious, that it doesn't even bother to see if there is space for a 95mb file. I deleted the small truncated pup_410.sfs and the damaged pup_save.2fs

Try it a different way.

Boot with 4.10 CD-ROM, on the reboot, make a pup_save file using the fill_partition. Then it offered to copy the sfs files to the disk if I want. Of course I didn't try the impossible.

Boot back up, it copied the 95mb pup_410.sfs file and truncated it again.

Where is the programming logic that presumes that any and every partitions every where at all times have 100mb free space for the file copy? Or that truncated sfs files can be successfully used?

Previously, a person could just save the pup_save to disk and boot from the CD-ROM as he choose.

I looked over the bug list, and didn't see anything mentioned. Just a design change, I suppose. I should work most of the time, because most of the time the partition hosting the pup_save file will have the 95mb necessary.

Bruce

[Bruce B]

In the case of pfix=ram.

I think it is unlikely that any partitions ever get mounted r/w but I think some will get mounted r/o in a search for a pup_401.sfs file or similar. If your machine does not have enough RAM to load the pup_401.sfs file into memory then the partition will remain mounted (r/o I think).

As a subject of interest, I hope. In the 1.xx days there were many FAT partitions, but the NTFS partitions were increasing steadily in percentage. We could read NTFS, there were some extenders to write to them, but it was at that time considered unsafe and unwise.

There were a few tricks to installing Puppy we don't have to do anymore. IIRC, the pup001 file (now known as pup_save) was a zip file, to be downloaded and extracted while running your NT version of Windows.

At that time pup001 was sitting on an ntfs partition, which was mounted ro. Yet it was being written to during the session.

It puzzled me to think you could write to a file that was on a read only partition, but that's how it was done.

[jameskinds]

Thank you everyone for the great contributions.

While the points raised are certainly of interest, they do not answer the original question directly.

Asked another way, is it possible to have puppy boot of CD and not display any drives on the desktop i.e. ensure that the drives are unmounted as a default behaviour.

When I boot Puppy on a guest machine all accessible partitions are mounted automatically. While this is certainly behaviour that you would usually want, it would be great if there was a switch to stop this occurring.

In short I was hoping that there was a way to boot Puppy from a CD and not have any links to drives shown on the desktop.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks again.

James

[Bruce B]

Bruce

Thank you everyone for the great contributions.

While the points raised are certainly of interest, they do not answer the original question directly.

Your original question was answered directly.

Here is your original question:

I was wondering if it is possible to boot Puppy (possibly with a cheat code) such that it does not mount any drives on the host system. Alternatively if it does mount drives, that it mounts them in a read only mode.

The reason for this is that I would like a way to boot Puppy on a host system safe in the knowledge that it is not possible for me to (even accidentally) make any changes to the data on the host system.

Here is my reply which completely answered your question.

Puppy's default behavior is to search most media. If it finds a pup_save file, it will mount the host partition and use that save_file

To prevent this, at the 5sec delay type puppy pfix=ram

In either case Puppy will activate any swap partitions it finds.

1) you got the cheat code which prevents the search for the pup_save file and the subsequent mounting of a partition which contained it. The alternately part of your question doesn't kick in because the cheat code takes care of that

2) you got a additional brief explanation of Puppy's default behavior, namely, what happens in the absence of the cheat code and it is well articulated

3) any swap partitions you have will be activated, which is not the same as mounting exactly, but there is no way out of that, except to deactivate them, but I doubt you have swap partitions. and your stated reasons, the concern for data loss, don't kick in because there would be no data on a swap partition

--------------------------

If you would like other questions answered, I good with that, but not on the basis your original was not answered, because it was.

Bruce

[Béèm]

When I boot Puppy on a guest machine all accessible partitions are mounted automatically. While this is certainly behaviour that you would usually want, it would be great if there was a switch to stop this occurring.

When I boot from CD, none of my drives (HDD or USB) are mounted.
You can, at the end of the first CD session, save the configuration to the CD. This is called a multi-session CD. See

[jameskinds]

Hi all,

Thank you for the help.

It was my bad assumption that lead me to thinking the drives were mounted.

I have checked again and indeed the drives are not mounted by default. However there are icons available on the desktop that facilitate an automount when selected.

I was under the impression because the drive icons appeared on the desktop, that the drives themselves had been mounted.

I was hoping that there may be a way to not have the drive icons displayed on the desktop by default. But this is a minor preference.

Thanks again.

Regards,

James

[Béèm]

If a drive is mounted a green dot appears.
I suppose you boot from CD/DVD in multi-sessio (meaning your configuration is saved on the CD/DVD)
In that case you could to the Puppy Event Manager and turn off hot plugging, so no accidents can occur.