I am very linux competent, having been using it exclusively since 2005, though my main OS is Xubuntu 12.04 at the moment, soon to be Xubuntu 14.04.
I also have an older netbook, also with Xubuntu 12.04 32bit on it, but I have been looking at Puppy 5.7.1 which I installed on a fat32 USB flash drive as a live system with unetbootin. The install to USB went fine but the netbook refuses to boot from it even though I choose the USB drive from its boot priority menu, and goes straight to the hard disk install of Xubuntu.
Just as a trial, but not anticipating success, I formatted the USB to ext2 and installed the same puppy .iso file to the USB again using unetbootin. The netbook will now boot to the Puppy OS very fast with no problems at all, which seems very strange to me.
Can anyone tell me if this is unusual, or if it is to be expected sometimes because of particular hardware specifications. I am certain that the same USB drive formatted to fat32 booted fine in the past with earlier versions of Puppy, so this seems very weird to me.
Any thought anyone? I am very happy to have the 5.7.1 version working for me in this way but simply wonder why a fat32 USB would not work this time. I thought a flash drive would boot only if formatted to fat32 when using a live system this way