rcrsn51 wrote:@otropogo: Look on your flash drive for the file syslinux.cfg and open it in a text editor. You should see the option "pmedia=usbflash". This tells Puppy to get all its files off the flash drive.
Delete it or change it to "pmedia=atahd".
Thanks for your suggestion. I'm afraid there's no cigar yet though.
I edited the syslinux.cfg, and it does now take some time to search the hard drives. And in fact, I've proven that it finds and loads the 528.sfs file from the hard drive by deleting it from the flash drive.
However, it ignores the existing lupusave-X.2fs files in the same directory as the sfs file, and doesn't offer any options on where to save a new 2fs file.
On reboot, it reports that the save file on the flash drive is being loaded, but there's no evidence of it as the display configuration is not implemented.
A couple of other strange things are happening too. When booting from the flash drive, one of the two ATA drives mounts unwritable, with the ntfs-3g error, which I haven't seen in lupuplus before. But this can't explain the other hdd not being offered for a save target, nor can it explain the 2fs files on the first not being offered. The writable drive also has a 2fs file on it.
Another very strange event is that when booting from flash with the 528.sfs file on the hdd, both mounted with the red dot (ie. can't be unmounted), and after I copied a bare-bones lupusave.2fs to the flash drive and booted, it appeared on the flash drive within a pupsave directory I hadn't created, and also in a pupsave directory on the 528.sfs hdd, where it didn't exist, whereas the main 2fs file in that hdd directory disappeared.
When I rebooted from LiveCD, the hdd pupsave directory was as before, no barebones 2fs, and the disappeared 2fs back where it belonged (together with several other files that disappeared with it).
The auto-created pupsaves folder on the flash drive persists, however.
Lots of scary stuff. I was glad I had a recent backup of my 2fs file.
I did figure out the problem of failed save to the flash. It was caused by a loose write protect tab.
Update, several rounds later:
I managed to establish that :
1. with the flash installation I used, the loader will find and load the sfs file from the hard drive, but not the 2fs file, even if it's created on the flash drive and copied to the hdd
2. the only save option is to the flash drive, and after that's created, no further saves are possible, you can enlarge the save file, but cannot create an alternate one
3. I was eventually able to save my configuration in the save to flash, but it took two steps. It only worked on the second boot.
4. the ntfs read only problem went away, but didn't change anything with the other problems.
After a few boots, I got a kernel panic crash, and some 440 odd MB were mysterioulsy missing from the 500MB flash card.
Since I had no quick way of formatting the card, I tried installing all over with the universal installer. I chose the last option on the menu for mbr, and I elected to wipe all the files. Everything appeared to go without a hitch, and much, much too quickly. And a reboot ended with another kernel panic crash.
When I looked at the flash card with Pmount after booting with the CD, pmount miraculously showed the card as having 513MB, and the 300_ MB 528.sfs file was reduced to only 8MB. So the card is now out of commission until and unless I can get it fixed under Gparted or Windows.
A glorious waste of time...
Damn! I forgot Gparted doesn't work in Puppy any more...