How to install Puppy on Toshiba 3110ct?

[Hawkeye]

Hello everyone, I'm new to Linux and I have an old Tosh 3110CT that I'd like to put Puppy onto. It has no CD drive and only USB, not USB2.
The problem I have is that I was given the tosh for nothing but it has no windows user password so I can't log onto windows. Can I create a bootable floppy or usb that will allow me to put Puppy on it?

And help would be great.

Thanks in advance.

[Hawkeye]

Thought it might help if you had a bit more info about the tosh.

http://www0.dealtime.co.uk/xPF-Toshiba- ... -P311UK-XT

Hope this helps.

Hawkeye

[mikeb]

My method here

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=38846

may be helpful/adaptable for your situation as you can boot windows but simply not log on.
Booting from a usb flash installation may not work and would be slow if it did in your case.
By the way there are useful programs out there (google) for getting around lost windows passwords (run from floppy) or perhaps delete the profile once you have puppy working...


mike

ps I am assuming something like XP or 2000 on there. If it's 98 than the boot situation is different but grub4dos has dos tools to deal with it.

[Hawkeye]

Hiya,
It was '98 on it. Is that a problem?

Thanks for the link and the info.

[mikeb]

It was '98 on it. Is that a problem?

not particularily but a different approach would be needed.
Either way a dos boot floppy such as windows 98 has will be needed as you have no running operating system. (by the way deleting the password file for the user in c:/windows is all you need to do if I recall...you certain its not the laptop password?)

Actually my brain is not in.....access to usb drives from dos is the real problem here...or via network. to get the necessary files transferred to the hard drive. Free dos might be more helpful.
Realistically speaking trying to fix the windows from a dos boot disk is the best approach...once running everything else is pretty straightforward.

mike

[rcrsn51]

Go to Menu > Setup and run the option for creating a Wakepup boot floppy.

Get a flash drive and copy the core Puppy files onto it - vmlinuz, initrd.gz and pupxxx.sfs.

You also need to put a dummy marker file on the flash drive - I believe it's called USBFLASH. There is documentation on the diskette.

Plug the flash drive into your laptop and boot off the diskette.

[cherriepuppy]

hi

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=5311


cherriepuppy

[mikeb]

Thanks rcrsn51, I had a mental blank there.......doh
Probably because I always remove floppy drives

regards

mike

[rcrsn51]

Personally, I leave floppy drives in place so there isn't a gaping hole in the front of the machine. Then I disable them in the BIOS.

[mikeb]

Could use the drive for credit card storage or the hole for cookie holder

mike

[Hawkeye]

Many thanks for all the help.

I'll let you know how it goes.

[sky king]

I tried running puppy 2.16 from the USB 1 on an old laptop and it was agonizingly slow. Just seemed to churn forever. I think I used the universal installer to put the files on the hard drive. Then boot from a wakepup floppy. It does work, but browsing the web is not very good. Win95 works better on that computer (depending on what you want to do, I guess), but at least the USB is able to be used for saving some files. I must not be able to use more than 64 MB of RAM on that one, I have 96 MB on there, but it doesn't get recognized above 64. More would make it run better, I'm sure.

I may buy an older laptop with USB 2 and no hard drive that will take 256 MB of RAM at least, then run Puppy from USB memory stick. There's a lot of info on these forums. Linux has come a long way in the last few years for user friendliness.

[mikeb]

I tried running puppy 2.16 from the USB 1 on an old laptop and it was agonizingly slow. Just seemed to churn forever.

well once he has achieved some form of booting I would suggest a full install to hard drive for best performance

mike

[cretsiah]

well a slightly diferent aproach might be using 1 of these:
http://www.testseek.com/computers/compu ... b770f.html

what it does is enable you to plug a hardrive into another computer works for laptop, ide and sata drives...

how do you do it..

take hardrive out of laptop and using cables plug into other comp..
boot up puppy,
- create a swap partiton using gparted *
- use universal installer to install to the now external hardrive..
- install grub..

next step after instaling grub:
-open file called menu.lst and check the mapping of the drive. **
-shut down comp unplug hd
-re-insert laptop drive
-boot laptop

notes * -given size of ram try creating swap of 256-512 megs
creating swap
- create 2 partitions : first 1 ext2 primary and set boot flag (hda1 or sda1)
- second partition create logical partition 256-512megs (hda2 or sda2)
-under the second partition you will still have unallocated space click on it and create new parttion.
- this time find swap and apply (swap is usually referred to as hda5 or sda5)..

** - depending on the version of puppy external drives can play havock with the grub installer.
- to fix this and have it boot properly (providing you remebered to set boot flag on hda1)
- you need to have an entry in the menu.lst file that looks something like this:

Title linux
root (0,0)
Kernel vmlinuz
Initrd Initrd.gz

this does depend on the way you set it up of course...

sorry i have probably made it even harder for you..

[Hawkeye]

Thanks for all the help and advice chaps, but the Tosh died on me (overheating and smell of burning). I now have Puppy running a dream on an old HP laptop.


Thanks again for all the advice.

[mikeb]

but the Tosh died on me (overheating and smell of burning)

well didn't want to say anything before but from a hardware engineer's point of view Toshiba's are a pile of crap...life has just done you a big favour.

now have fun

mike

[Hawkeye]

Cheers Mike.