[Ham-Computers] Puppy Linux on hard disk

[fkamp at comcast.net]

doc wrote:
> 
> I have it loaded on the hdd on my IBM 600X laptop.
> The hdd install went really smoothly for me.
> 
> Did you load from Puppy when it was running off the
> CD or did you load using some other method?
> 

I wanted it to reside on its own hard drive with
swap partition.

I have more computer stuff that I can use.  I use
about three of them regularly.  Another two are
used on occasion, and several systems are in
various states of incompleteness.  I would get rid
of some of the stuff but it not worth much even
though it works.  Everything is pentium or better
with CPU speeds up to 233mhz.  Most of the stuff
only has 64meg ram.

I want to use as much of that stuff as I can so I
was going to set up one computer for puppy linux. 
No dual boot.  I tried that before and it never
worked out cleanly.  However with a pupxx file in
a vfat partition under windows, seems puppy would
make for a very clean dual boot system.  I wanted
a puppy dedicated system so that the /usr area
would be read/write.

Most of my computers that are fully functional
also have removable hard drives.  A receiver is
mounted into a 5-1/4 inch drive bay and a tray
plugs into the receiver.  The tray holds one
standard 3.5 inch hard drive.

I am looking foward to seeing how puppy runs on
the rest of my machines, but I wanted to do that
with a dedicated hard drive that I can just
plug-in and go.  All of the bioses can auto detect
hard drives.

Okay, so that is where I was headed.  Here is what
I did to install to hard drive.

The hard drive I was using is only 540meg.  I
wanted puppy on a 400meg partition and then use
the rest of the drive for swap.  I could setup the
drive for VFAT and let puppy create a pupxxx file,
but VFAT requires at least 517meg partition.  It
would require the entire hard disk be dedicated to
VFAT and that would not give me any left over
space to do a puppy hd instal.

So, I wiped the hard drive clean.  No partitions
at all.  I booted puppy off cd, it could not find
any hard drive partitions, so it loaded into the
128meg of ram memory I have on this particular
computer.

>From there I used cfdisk to create a 400meg ext2
partition and a swap partition.  Then I used the
puppy install to hard disk utility.  I also
created a boot floppy (just in case).  Then I
tried to install Grub.  Seemed to go okay.  Grub
claimed a successful instal, but when I tried to
reboot off the hard drive I got that error2 from
Grub.  It probably could not find anything to
boot.  Dont know.  Need to find out.

Also, I am pretty sure that I did not create the
swap partition properly. I used mkfs on it and
have since found out there is a special program to
prepare a swap partition, and something about
swapon to activate it.  I have never had to fool
with preparing swap partitions manually.  All I
ever needed before was a partition with 82 type
identifier and the installation software would
automagically take care of getting the swap area
ready for use.

So there may be more issues than just that error2
problem.

It would not take much to do it all over again.  I
might try that just to see what happens.  I also
found some new information about hard drive puppy
on the internet earlier this morn.  Need to digest
that too.

Regards,
Frank Kamp
K5DKZ