Thanks so much for your reply. But I am a bit confused, and sorry for being slow: how am I going to unmount sda, if that's where I want to do the things you say? I tried from gparted, see attached picture in my reply above. When I try to unmount, it says it cannot do it because dev_save is busy!theru wrote: First we need to create a backup of mbr + partition table (make sure the drive isn't mounted):
Replace X with the drive you want to work on.Code: Select all
dd if=/dev/sdX of=/root/mbr.bin bs=512 count=1
Puppy linux frugal installation, problem booting [Solved]
If I understand correctly you're booting from the usb but the savefile is on the harddrive. In this case you need to boot without using the savefile. The boot option pfix=ram should do that.
Assuming you're booting to a pup menu similar to attached picture (the image may be different) you need to press f2 as soon as the menu pops up and type puppy pfix=ram This will skip the savefile and boot to a new session.
Edit: And you don't need gparted to unmount partitions. You can do that by right-clicking on the drive icon on the desktop and selecting "unmount". Alternatively you can also use Pmount which you can find in the menu under Filesystem.
Assuming you're booting to a pup menu similar to attached picture (the image may be different) you need to press f2 as soon as the menu pops up and type puppy pfix=ram This will skip the savefile and boot to a new session.
Edit: And you don't need gparted to unmount partitions. You can do that by right-clicking on the drive icon on the desktop and selecting "unmount". Alternatively you can also use Pmount which you can find in the menu under Filesystem.
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Last edited by theru on Wed 01 Mar 2017, 21:27, edited 1 time in total.
Hey, wait...
Do you want to keep your Lubuntu installation, don't you?
So, don't do a full installation of Puppy alongside with Lubuntu, it will be a mess, and you will end with two unusable OS.
Puppy frugally installed in it's own folder can coexist with other linuxes without problems, but frugal not full installed. (imagine installing Windows XP and Windows 7 in the same Windows folder).
Be carefull with Gparted, you can delete everything!!!
Here it's necesary to restore the MBR, it can be done by formatting, but it's a bit drastical.
Do you want to keep your Lubuntu installation, don't you?
So, don't do a full installation of Puppy alongside with Lubuntu, it will be a mess, and you will end with two unusable OS.
Puppy frugally installed in it's own folder can coexist with other linuxes without problems, but frugal not full installed. (imagine installing Windows XP and Windows 7 in the same Windows folder).
Be carefull with Gparted, you can delete everything!!!
Here it's necesary to restore the MBR, it can be done by formatting, but it's a bit drastical.
Remember: [b][i]"pecunia pecuniam parere non potest"[/i][/b]
Thanks for the explanation. I did everything carefully, with the dd's, then I rebooted and wee messages are still theretheru wrote:If I understand correctly you're booting from the usb but the savefile is on the harddrive. In this case you need to boot without using the savefile. The boot option pfix=ram should do that.
Assuming you're booting to a pup menu similar to attached picture (the image may be different) you need to press f2 as soon as the menu pops up and type puppy pfix=ram This will skip the savefile and boot to a new session.
Edit: And you don't need gparted to unmount partitions. You can do that by right-clicking on the drive icon on the desktop and selecting "unmount". Alternatively you can also use Pmount which you can find in the menu under Filesystem.
theru is posting at the same time:-)
Read last line of this post
If you still would want to/have to install frugally, I try to explain better :
Don't worry about messing up. It is very hard to do
WARNING: REFORMATTING WITH GPARTED OR ANY OTHER TOOL WILL ENTIRELY WHIPE OUT ANYTHING ON YOUR PARTITION!!!
FIRST BACKUP ANY ESSENTIAL DATA
USE AS A LAST RESORT ONLY!!!. I mean you let puppy do it for you. You will have to make some choices. You should choose a file and not a folder/map. [edited] if you want to use a big program like Latex, you probably choose folder/map [edited]
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 1&start=70 Look for the posts of emil
But it is more then 5 years old. If you do not want to use it, you would have to get it by hand [edited] not by hand, you can use the package manager [edited] from the packages of ubuntu or debian.
If you want to use something that big, you could do a full install of puppy anyway!!!
Copy the iso of your puppy on the usb , next to the installation on the usb (see above).
Let the puppy universal installer do the full installation.
[edited] correction: still better frugal, but with pupsavefolder
thanks theru[edited]
Read last line of this post
If you still would want to/have to install frugally, I try to explain better :
Don't worry about messing up. It is very hard to do
It is under Partition, or when you rightclick on the line.I open gParted but I do not see a button of formatting! Just sda1 etc.
WARNING: REFORMATTING WITH GPARTED OR ANY OTHER TOOL WILL ENTIRELY WHIPE OUT ANYTHING ON YOUR PARTITION!!!
FIRST BACKUP ANY ESSENTIAL DATA
USE AS A LAST RESORT ONLY!!!
You installed the iso on the usb with rufus, you did not COPY it. You want initrd.gz, vmlinuz, puppy_tahr_6.0.5.sfs, zdrv_tahr_6.0.5.sfs from inside the iso and not from the installation (they are in use!) . So just put the iso on the usb, so you can get to it.For the reinstallation, I don't understand: the iso is already in the USB!
After reformatting sda1 (set the boot flag too if it is not there yet) you can close gparted. Then on the desktop click on the icon for sda1 to mount it (it has to be unmounted when you are in gparted; if not rightclick on the icon on the desktop...) , rightclick somewhere on the empty sda1 directory and choose new, map from the menu.I don't know how to make a map.
You do not do it yourself, would be very hard to doI think I am beyond saving
. I mean you let puppy do it for you. You will have to make some choices. You should choose a file and not a folder/map. [edited] if you want to use a big program like Latex, you probably choose folder/map [edited]It is not a common thing to install. I saw this:fuss of reinstalling full Latex
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 1&start=70 Look for the posts of emil
But it is more then 5 years old. If you do not want to use it, you would have to get it by hand [edited] not by hand, you can use the package manager [edited] from the packages of ubuntu or debian.
If you want to use something that big, you could do a full install of puppy anyway!!!
Copy the iso of your puppy on the usb , next to the installation on the usb (see above).
Let the puppy universal installer do the full installation.
[edited] correction: still better frugal, but with pupsavefolder
thanks theru[edited]
Last edited by foxpup on Thu 02 Mar 2017, 08:49, edited 2 times in total.
Ok I now found how to reformat with gparted. However, does this mean that all my data will be erased? From Lubuntu as well? Sorry for the (non-)depth of my questions.foxpup wrote:You should reformat your sda1 where you will install your distribution. That's what Rufus also does, or any installer, to clear the partition. With this booting troubles, you should definitly do it!
You can use gparted from your puppy on usb to do it.
Yes it does mean that everything will be gone. Dont do it if you are not sure you want to start all, ALL, over.LidiaS wrote:Ok I now found how to reformat with gparted. However, does this mean that all my data will be erased? From Lubuntu as well? Sorry for the (non-)depth of my questions.foxpup wrote:You should reformat your sda1 where you will install your distribution. That's what Rufus also does, or any installer, to clear the partition. With this booting troubles, you should definitly do it!
You can use gparted from your puppy on usb to do it.
You didn't restore the partition table, did you? This would undo all the zeroing/reinstalling of the mbr and is only meant for when the process fails and you end up losing all of your partitions.LidiaS wrote:Thanks for the explanation. I did everything carefully, with the dd's, then I rebooted and wee messages are still there
I once had a boot failure with windows. Only after 3 attempts did the repair tool manage to restore the mbr.
I really hope we get this sorted without needing to reformat everything.
And I agree about a frugally installed puppy. I have several on my harddrive alongside windows which I rarely need these days.
And when you use a linux partition then you can use a savefolder. This folder doesn't have a fixed size can grow as large as the space on your harddrive allows.
Last edited by theru on Wed 01 Mar 2017, 22:47, edited 1 time in total.
To make it even more confusing another thought:
Do you have unallocated space on your drive? Or a partition you do not use? You could make a full install of puppy there.
But that will not solve the problem of your machine not booting from hdd.
However. If you give the boot flag to that other partition (with puppy installed or not), you could set the new partition up with grub4dos to take care of booting from the hdd. I would boot lubuntu as well.
Any other ideas?
Or let the usb stick bootup the installations on the hdd. Rufus probably installs syslinux on the usb.
Do you have unallocated space on your drive? Or a partition you do not use? You could make a full install of puppy there.
But that will not solve the problem of your machine not booting from hdd.
However. If you give the boot flag to that other partition (with puppy installed or not), you could set the new partition up with grub4dos to take care of booting from the hdd. I would boot lubuntu as well.
Any other ideas?
Or let the usb stick bootup the installations on the hdd. Rufus probably installs syslinux on the usb.
Post subject
Hi Lidia5,
Before doing something radical, let's try something simple. You may have tried it before, but it pays to make certain that everything was done in the correct order.
1. Boot into Tahrpup following theru's suggestion. As soon as Tahrpup begins to boot, press f2 and type puppy pfix=ram.
2. Just above the Taskbar, at the far left you'll see two icons, one with the name sda1, the other with the name sdb1.
3. Left-click the sdb1 icon. A window will open showing the contents of your USB-Stick. You should see both a file named gldr and another named menu.lst.
4. Put your mouse-cursor on the title of the window which opened, Left-Press and drag the window to the top-left of your screen.
5. Left-click the sda1 icon, opening a window to its contents. If necessary, move the two windows so that you can see the gldr and menu.lst files in the sdb1 window, and an empty space in the sda1 window.
6. Place your mouse-cursor on menu.lst in the sdb1, press, then drag it to an empty space in the sda1 window. Release the mouse and a menu will pop up. Select copy.
7. Now do the same with the gldr file. If asked, allow an over-write.
The above is the solution if the problem was that you have the "base" Tahrpup files on your USB-Stick but your SaveFile on the hard-drive. Unless you boot "pfix=ram", every time you boot into Tahrpup it mounts the drives on which its files are located, and grub4dos can't write to a mounted drive.
If your system won't allow you to copy menu.lst from sdb1 to sda1, then there's some more complicated problem.
mikesLr
Before doing something radical, let's try something simple. You may have tried it before, but it pays to make certain that everything was done in the correct order.
1. Boot into Tahrpup following theru's suggestion. As soon as Tahrpup begins to boot, press f2 and type puppy pfix=ram.
2. Just above the Taskbar, at the far left you'll see two icons, one with the name sda1, the other with the name sdb1.
3. Left-click the sdb1 icon. A window will open showing the contents of your USB-Stick. You should see both a file named gldr and another named menu.lst.
4. Put your mouse-cursor on the title of the window which opened, Left-Press and drag the window to the top-left of your screen.
5. Left-click the sda1 icon, opening a window to its contents. If necessary, move the two windows so that you can see the gldr and menu.lst files in the sdb1 window, and an empty space in the sda1 window.
6. Place your mouse-cursor on menu.lst in the sdb1, press, then drag it to an empty space in the sda1 window. Release the mouse and a menu will pop up. Select copy.
7. Now do the same with the gldr file. If asked, allow an over-write.
The above is the solution if the problem was that you have the "base" Tahrpup files on your USB-Stick but your SaveFile on the hard-drive. Unless you boot "pfix=ram", every time you boot into Tahrpup it mounts the drives on which its files are located, and grub4dos can't write to a mounted drive.
If your system won't allow you to copy menu.lst from sdb1 to sda1, then there's some more complicated problem.
mikesLr
@mikeslr: Good thinking! I hope it is that simple. Shouldn't grub4dos also rewrite the boot record on sda1? That too must have failed then.The above is the solution if the problem was that you have the "base" Tahrpup files on your USB-Stick but your SaveFile on the hard-drive. Unless you boot "pfix=ram", every time you boot into Tahrpup it mounts the drives on which its files are located, and grub4dos can't write to a mounted drive.
The solution would then simply be to delete the pupsave from sda1 and rerun grub4dos. Right?
Post Subject
Hi again Lidia5,
What we are trying to preserve is your Lubuntu installation, and especially any files you created or stored within it: photos, documents, music files, etc.
Using gparted to clear any left-over files which may be preventing grub4dos from writing to sda will also delete Lubuntu and any and every file on sda.
And I still don't know some basic information. What exactly did you do to install Lubuntu? If you had to, are you able to do it again?
When grub4dos creates a menu.lst, it always provides a listing for Windows, even if you don't have Windows on your computer. [Don't ask me why; I didn't write the program]. But does your hard-drive also have an installation of Windows in addition to Lubuntu?
If your computer can run Tahrpup, there is no reason to ever do a Full Install of any Puppy. Ever. Puppies were originally created to run from a CD. They evolved to run from a hard-drive or a USB-drive "as if" such drive were a CD. That is why Puppies only need a folder on a drive. 6 or 7 years ago, when computers were sold with less than 256 Mbs of Random Access Memory and a single-core weak-by-today's-standard computer processing unit, it could take a significant amount of time to boot into a Puppy. Someone figured out that it would take less time if Puppy was installed "like" other Linux distros. On a more recent, more powerful computer the difference in boot time is measured in seconds, maybe milliseconds. Tahrpup requires more computer resources than are found on computers which benefited by Full Installs. And Puppies aren't like other distros. They are designed to treat "storage" and Random Access Memory as a Unity, writing and reading from "storage" as and when convenient. Puppies, coming from a CD which couldn't be written to, are designed to "run in RAM". That's one of the reasons for their speed. They only read from storage when necessary and, now, write to storage rarely. A Full install removes Puppies advantages, and add complicating disadvantages not found either in the Frugal Install of a Puppy or a normal install of a distro designed to be a "Full Install."
Now that you can boot Tahrpup from a USB-Stick, it will take less than 5 minutes to do a Frugal install to your hard-drive, if we can solve the problem of writing grub4dos and its menu.lst to that drive; and you actually want to have Puppy on your drive. The procedure is simple:
1. Create a folder on the hard-drive with a unique name, e.g. tahr2.
2. Copy tahrpup's files (except the SaveFile) from the USB-Stick into that folder.
3. Run grub4dos.
4, Unplug the USB-stick.
5. Reboot into tahrpup on the hard-drive.
6. Plug in the USB-Stick; and
7. Copy the SaveFile from the USB-stick into the tahr2 folder.
8. Reboot.
mikesLr
What we are trying to preserve is your Lubuntu installation, and especially any files you created or stored within it: photos, documents, music files, etc.
Using gparted to clear any left-over files which may be preventing grub4dos from writing to sda will also delete Lubuntu and any and every file on sda.
And I still don't know some basic information. What exactly did you do to install Lubuntu? If you had to, are you able to do it again?
When grub4dos creates a menu.lst, it always provides a listing for Windows, even if you don't have Windows on your computer. [Don't ask me why; I didn't write the program]. But does your hard-drive also have an installation of Windows in addition to Lubuntu?
If your computer can run Tahrpup, there is no reason to ever do a Full Install of any Puppy. Ever. Puppies were originally created to run from a CD. They evolved to run from a hard-drive or a USB-drive "as if" such drive were a CD. That is why Puppies only need a folder on a drive. 6 or 7 years ago, when computers were sold with less than 256 Mbs of Random Access Memory and a single-core weak-by-today's-standard computer processing unit, it could take a significant amount of time to boot into a Puppy. Someone figured out that it would take less time if Puppy was installed "like" other Linux distros. On a more recent, more powerful computer the difference in boot time is measured in seconds, maybe milliseconds. Tahrpup requires more computer resources than are found on computers which benefited by Full Installs. And Puppies aren't like other distros. They are designed to treat "storage" and Random Access Memory as a Unity, writing and reading from "storage" as and when convenient. Puppies, coming from a CD which couldn't be written to, are designed to "run in RAM". That's one of the reasons for their speed. They only read from storage when necessary and, now, write to storage rarely. A Full install removes Puppies advantages, and add complicating disadvantages not found either in the Frugal Install of a Puppy or a normal install of a distro designed to be a "Full Install."
Now that you can boot Tahrpup from a USB-Stick, it will take less than 5 minutes to do a Frugal install to your hard-drive, if we can solve the problem of writing grub4dos and its menu.lst to that drive; and you actually want to have Puppy on your drive. The procedure is simple:
1. Create a folder on the hard-drive with a unique name, e.g. tahr2.
2. Copy tahrpup's files (except the SaveFile) from the USB-Stick into that folder.
3. Run grub4dos.
4, Unplug the USB-stick.
5. Reboot into tahrpup on the hard-drive.
6. Plug in the USB-Stick; and
7. Copy the SaveFile from the USB-stick into the tahr2 folder.
8. Reboot.
mikesLr
Re: Post subject
In general yes, I wouldn't want to lose Lubuntu as well if possible. It's not that I have important files, I have everything at DropBox, it's just other installations of programs that will take some time. I will surely reinstall Lubuntu again if I have to, for the time being. I honestly don't remember which .iso I had used, but I always do it from bootable USBs.
Unfortunately the two files you mention are not in the sdb1, but in sda1. See attached. Does this say something? And they are not 0 bytes too. The flag 'boot' has always been at sda, yes.mikeslr wrote: Before doing something radical, let's try something simple. You may have tried it before, but it pays to make certain that everything was done in the correct order.
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No I didn't, I only run the two first dd's. I will try again thanks!theru wrote:You didn't restore the partition table, did you? This would undo all the zeroing/reinstalling of the mbr and is only meant for when the process fails and you end up losing all of your partitions.LidiaS wrote:Thanks for the explanation. I did everything carefully, with the dd's, then I rebooted and wee messages are still there
By now I am surely convinced frugal is better. I just wish it works.
Foxpup, thanks for not admitting I am beyond help. And I am really amazed at how everyone is so helpful here. I wish I could be of such help to others. I will still try mikeslr final solution.
Re: Post Subject
Will do this tomorrow. Just a quick question, when you say create a folder on the hard-drive, do you just mean to creat a folder somewhere in /root , having booted my system as always from the USB?mikeslr wrote: 1. Create a folder on the hard-drive with a unique name, e.g. tahr2.
2. Copy tahrpup's files (except the SaveFile) from the USB-Stick into that folder.
3. Run grub4dos.
4, Unplug the USB-stick.
5. Reboot into tahrpup on the hard-drive.
6. Plug in the USB-Stick; and
7. Copy the SaveFile from the USB-stick into the tahr2 folder.
8. Reboot.
Hey LidiaS, I am relieved you did not reformat sda1!
There are a few menu...lst in sda1. I presume they are all made by puppy. The content you posted came from one of them? I presume the grldr also comes from puppy, but it is not certain to me.
What matters:
You can see that both sda1 and sdb1 are mounted. And the tahrsave-Foldernotknowwhatsdoing is on the hdd (sda1)! It should be on the usb (sdb1). That looks good! It is what mikesLr was thinking of
Moving or deleting the pupsave should do it.
Let's just wait for mike's opinion and instructions.
nb: in sda1 you see the full install, the directory structure bare as it were, of your lubuntu installation. Besides it you see the puppy folder; inside you should find initrd.gz (init), vmlinuz (linuxkernel) and puppy_tahr_6.0.5.sfs (main puppy) and zdrv_tahr_6.0.5.sfs (drivers). These contain the same filestructure (almost) as lubuntu does. On top of that, the puppy structure is layered. Much nicer don't you agree?
ps: I wonder why there are old kernel and old init.
No I think it is alright. grldr and menu.lst should not be on the usb. The usb uses another bootloader: isolinux(syslinux).Unfortunately the two files you mention are not in the sdb1, but in sda1. See attached. Does this say something?
There are a few menu...lst in sda1. I presume they are all made by puppy. The content you posted came from one of them? I presume the grldr also comes from puppy, but it is not certain to me.
What matters:
You can see that both sda1 and sdb1 are mounted. And the tahrsave-Foldernotknowwhatsdoing is on the hdd (sda1)! It should be on the usb (sdb1). That looks good! It is what mikesLr was thinking of
Moving or deleting the pupsave should do it.
Let's just wait for mike's opinion and instructions.
nb: in sda1 you see the full install, the directory structure bare as it were, of your lubuntu installation. Besides it you see the puppy folder; inside you should find initrd.gz (init), vmlinuz (linuxkernel) and puppy_tahr_6.0.5.sfs (main puppy) and zdrv_tahr_6.0.5.sfs (drivers). These contain the same filestructure (almost) as lubuntu does. On top of that, the puppy structure is layered. Much nicer don't you agree?
ps: I wonder why there are old kernel and old init.
Re: Post Subject
No, mikesLr means on the partition sda1.LidiaS wrote:Will do this tomorrow. Just a quick question, when you say create a folder on the hard-drive, do you just mean to creat a folder somewhere in /root , having booted my system as always from the USB?
/root is part of the file structure and it will be in xxxx.sfs or xxxx.3fs or in RAM. The first 2 are files on the device/partition you put them on.
A device or a partition is outside of the filestructure. You can access partitions through the filestructure on /mnt/sda1, /mnt/home/, /mnt/sdb1 etc...
In your lubuntu the xxxx.sfs and xxxx.3fs do not exist, and the filestructure is scattered on the partition. It's easier to see what is inside or outside the puppy, than to see what is inside or outside lubuntu.
It needs some 'getting used to' at first.
Last edited by foxpup on Thu 02 Mar 2017, 08:55, edited 1 time in total.
Weii, I guess wrong but that's Great!!
Hi LIdia5 & All,
Well, I almost got it right. Tahrpup's core=necessary files are on the USB-stick. So the SaveFile must be in one of the folders on sda1 which start with the name tahr.
The easiest solution is to boot into Tahrpup pfix=ram delete those two folder [Right-click a folder and from the popup menu select delete, then quiet or yes to confirm. When deleting a folder quiet won't ask for confirmation as to every file within it].
That will remove whatever is in those folders from sda1. When you reboot into Tahrpup your situation should be:
There's no SaveFile so Tahrpup will display its First Run Dialog. Close that for now. It's more important to first straighten out Grub4dos. Run grub4dos, make sure it will be installed to sdb. Click the "Search only this device" radio button.
Then you might want to see if you can boot into Lubuntu if the USB-Key isn't plugged in. I don't think you can. If you can't reboot into tahrpup or if you don't want to try just run grub4dos, this time selecting sda and again clicking the "Search only this device" radio button.
At some point in time you'll want to create a SaveFile. Make certain that it will be placed on sdb.
You can decide later if you want to have a frugal install of tahrpup on your hard-drive.
The recipe is given here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 627#945627, But maybe I should add something about handling Grub4dos. When you run Grub4dos so that it creates a listing for the "new" tahrpup you have two choices:
Is it going to be called from grub4dos on the hard-drive or grub4dos on the USB-Key? If the hard-drive (sda) then again select "search only this device". But if from the USB-Stick, it's going to find and create listings for both tahrpups. And you don't want the "hard-drive" tahrpup using the "USB-sticks" SaveFile. So you will want to accept Grub4dos' offer to allow you to edit menu.lst. And you'll want to edit the end of the line on the "hard-drive" tahrpup's listing which begins with kernel and ends with pfix=fsck to end with "pfix=fsck;ram" -- without the quotes and no spaces between fsck ; ram.
The first time you boot into the "hard-drive" tahrpup you can edit the USB's menu.lst back to read just "pfix=fsck". After you've created a SaveFile for this tahrpup, the psubdir argument on that line will do its job of restricting where that instance of tahrpup should look for its SaveFiles.
mikesLr
Well, I almost got it right. Tahrpup's core=necessary files are on the USB-stick. So the SaveFile must be in one of the folders on sda1 which start with the name tahr.
The easiest solution is to boot into Tahrpup pfix=ram delete those two folder [Right-click a folder and from the popup menu select delete, then quiet or yes to confirm. When deleting a folder quiet won't ask for confirmation as to every file within it].
That will remove whatever is in those folders from sda1. When you reboot into Tahrpup your situation should be:
There's no SaveFile so Tahrpup will display its First Run Dialog. Close that for now. It's more important to first straighten out Grub4dos. Run grub4dos, make sure it will be installed to sdb. Click the "Search only this device" radio button.
Then you might want to see if you can boot into Lubuntu if the USB-Key isn't plugged in. I don't think you can. If you can't reboot into tahrpup or if you don't want to try just run grub4dos, this time selecting sda and again clicking the "Search only this device" radio button.
At some point in time you'll want to create a SaveFile. Make certain that it will be placed on sdb.
You can decide later if you want to have a frugal install of tahrpup on your hard-drive.
The recipe is given here: http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 627#945627, But maybe I should add something about handling Grub4dos. When you run Grub4dos so that it creates a listing for the "new" tahrpup you have two choices:
Is it going to be called from grub4dos on the hard-drive or grub4dos on the USB-Key? If the hard-drive (sda) then again select "search only this device". But if from the USB-Stick, it's going to find and create listings for both tahrpups. And you don't want the "hard-drive" tahrpup using the "USB-sticks" SaveFile. So you will want to accept Grub4dos' offer to allow you to edit menu.lst. And you'll want to edit the end of the line on the "hard-drive" tahrpup's listing which begins with kernel and ends with pfix=fsck to end with "pfix=fsck;ram" -- without the quotes and no spaces between fsck ; ram.
The first time you boot into the "hard-drive" tahrpup you can edit the USB's menu.lst back to read just "pfix=fsck". After you've created a SaveFile for this tahrpup, the psubdir argument on that line will do its job of restricting where that instance of tahrpup should look for its SaveFiles.
mikesLr