rcrsn51 wrote:Other distros, like TinyCore or Fatdog, have a "wait" boot argument to handle this problem with USB devices.
If the same situation is occurring with your hard drive, it would be useful to know if my "sleep 5" suggestion makes any difference.
I need to return to my problem of my booting a frugal install of Fatslacko requiring PMEDIA to be removed to make it work - to let you know what I have found out.
I have found that the source of the problem was nothing to do with PMEDIA or it requiring a sleep parameter in the init to wait for detection. The real problem was that my PC builder installed Windows on the 2nd hard drive - leaving the first drive unformatted. This was not how I wanted it, of course, but I did not realise it until I started playing with Puppy and seeing the drive partition icons coming up sdb?.
In this configuration I had expected grub to require references to (hd1,4) but in fact that failed and (hd0,4) was still required. My original kernel line in menu.lst was then something like:
kernel (hd0,4)/vmlinuz PMEDIA=atahd PDEV1=sda5 psubdir=fatslacko ...
This failed to find the sfs file and eventually removing the PMEDIA=atahd made it work. I thus assumed PDEV1=sda5 was correct (working on my knowledge of the init logic in Puppy4). However the recent discussion here and rcrsn51's suggestion that, if PMEDIA is omitted, Puppy now ignores all other search boot codes and looks everywhere led me to conclude that when I got it working by removing PMEDIA, PDEV1 was not in fact doing anything.
I questioned in my mind whether perhaps, originally, PDEV1 was wrong and, despite grub referring to (hd0,4), Puppy still detected the drives properly and my sfs was actually on sdb.
I tried:
kernel (hd0,4)/vmlinuz PMEDIA=atahd PDEV1=sdb5 psubdir=fatslacko ...
It worked!
I am sorry for diverting the frugal discussion somewhat but we have learned something:
1) Grub will not detect an unformatted drive but Puppy does!
2) It seems PMEDIA is now mandatory if you want to restrict search with PDEV1 and psubdir
Thanks to rcrsn51 for sticking with me and his suggestions that have led to this new found knowledge.