GRUB4DOS Strange Behaviour

[stevie pup]

Having read @mikewalsh's glowing praise of Studio 13.37 in another thread, and having a particular interest in audio stuff, I decided to give it a spin.

So I downloaded the iso, copied it to a Ventoy USB, and booted it up to have an initial preview. All good, no issues, and looks very promising. Next I decided to do a frugal install, so extracted the files from iso into folder, then copied that onto a portable hard drive. Ext 3 and boot flag set.

Then things got weird. Came to run GRUB4DOS, and for some mysterious reason it hadn't recognised it as a frugal install. What was displayed was that it had recognised it as a full install. Ran it anyway but needless to say it wouldn't boot. Can't remember now what the error message was.

I didn't do anything any differently to what I've done with countless other Puppies. So if anyone's got any ideas as what on earth is going on I would much appreciate your comments. I've now wiped the drive so I can start again.

Thanks

[mikewalsh]

@stevie pup :-

Hm. That's strange. My frugally-installed copy of Studio 13.37 has an almost identical boot stanza to the dozen or so other Pups in the "kennels".....and I've only ever used Grub4DOS. Only the sub-directory name is different.

What does your Studio 13.37 boot stanza look like? Maybe I can help with this, maybe I can't.....but we can only try.

Mike.

[stevie pup]

@mikewalsh

Sorry Mike but I'm not familiar with all the terminology. What exactly do you mean by "boot stanza", and where do I find it?

[mikewalsh]

@mikewalsh

Sorry Mike but I'm not familiar with all the terminology. What exactly do you mean by "boot stanza", and where do I find it?

@stevie pup :-

Ah, sorry; "boot stanza" is what I call it. I'm talking about the contents of the 'menu.lst' file for Grub4DOS; a "boot stanza" is the individual boot-loader entry for a Puppy. You say you're trying to get this on an external USB-connected hard drive? Does the drive have any other Puppies on it, or are you starting again from scratch?

So; you've copied the contents of the ISO into a named sub-directory, yes? And when you run Grub4DOS, it's seeing it as a 'full' install.....NOT frugal? Odd.

Um; right. Need more info, please. What's your hardware here? Is it an older MBR BIOS-type machine, or is it a newer one with UEFI? Can we have some specs, please? Make, model, CPU, amount of RAM, how much storage, etc.....all that jazz. You know the drill by now, I'm sure! The more info we have to work with, the better the chance of finding a solution.....'cos otherwise, it's just guesswork.

Over to you...

Mike.

[bigpup]

Grub4dos config does look for specific names when looking for frugal installs to make boot entries for.

You say you put all the files from the studio ISO in a directory(folder).

What did you name the directory?

If it does not have pup in the name.

That is one name it is looking for to know it is a Puppy Linux OS install.

Change it to have pup in the name.

Example:
studiopup

Rerun grub4dos config to make a new boot loader menu.

Any help?

[stevie pup]

@mikewalsh @bigpup

Yes I put all the files into a directory, which on my first attempt I named Puppy Studio. On my second attempt I changed this to Studiopup. Only this one on the drive, no other Puppies. The machine I normally use is HP G62. I3 2.13 Ghz, 6Gb RAM, 500 Gb HDD. BIOS only, no UEFI.

I did think of trying the tarball, just to see if it gave any different results, but I couldn't download it. Got error message "could not download - HTTP error". Menu 1st also shows it as full installed puppy, but having problems attaching that to my post, so I'll have to come back to it.

The boot process starts for a few seconds, then says "Partition must be ext2/ext3/ext4" then it fails.Makes no sense to me as I formatted whole drive as Ext3.

I'll just repeat, I have not at any point done anything any differently to other frugal installs I've done in the past.

[rockedge]

What did you name the directory?

If it does not have pup in the name.

That is one name it is looking for to know it is a Puppy Linux OS install.

Change it to have pup in the name.

I don't think that this is exactly how it works. We use Grub4Dos and Grub2config in KLV's and both will detect the frugally installed Kennel Linux installations as well as Puppy Linux's

What does come up is "unknown (some partition)" but recognizes that it is a frugal installed system. Of course these 2 programs are for Puppy Linux so the boot stanza's are generated for Puppy's and not KLV but that is an easy fix by manually adding the boot stanza's.

Even if Grub4Dos doesn't "see" the OS I'll let the program install the boot loader components and later I'll add the boot stanza's created by the add on program wd_grubconfig

My advice is run Grub4Dos and confirm letting it install the boot loader without worrying about the details of the generated menu.lst. Then add the correct boot stanza's to the menu.lst that is in the boot loader partition.

In a terminal use the command blkid to identify the UUID and or LABEL of the partitions. Then we can help write the correct boot stanza for your use case.

[stevie pup]

@rockedge

Here is the Menu 1st. I've had to do this as a screenshot as I kept getting error messages when I tried to attach it to my post. Having said that, it is exactly as GRUB4DOS created it, I haven't made any amendments. The UUID shown in Menu 1st is exactly the same as I see when I run "blkid".

So what next?

[stevie pup]

Just had another thought about this issue. Looks to me as though we're trying to solve the problem? Wouldn't it be better to try and establish the root cause of the problem? That is, why on earth is GRUB4DOS recognising it as a full install in the first place?

[rockedge]

The first boot stanza does not look right.....let's try a simplified version:

Code: Select all

title Linux Studiopup 1337
   uuid 80e29c47-bce9-440b-aa7a-904fbf3b9aa2
   kernel /Studiopup_1137-3.3/vmlinuz
   initrd /Studiopup_1137-3.3/initrd.gz

We can add some parameters once we see if there is a need too.

[bigpup]

Could try removing the ro fullinstall from the menu entry.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What specific version of Grub4dos Config are you using?

Need to make sure you are using the latest version.

I suggest you change the name of the directory(folder) the install is in to just studiopup.

I see by the boot menu entry it is named studiopup_1337-3.3.

If it is named studiopup then not sure why the menu entry would call it something else.

Post an image of what is in this studiopup directory(folder).

Maybe something there will be a clue.

[bigpup]

What did you name the directory?

If it does not have pup in the name.

That is one name it is looking for to know it is a Puppy Linux OS install.

Change it to have pup in the name.

I don't think that this is exactly how it works. We use Grub4Dos and Grub2config in KLV's and both will detect the frugally installed Kennel Linux installations as well as Puppy Linux's

What does come up is "unknown (some partition)" but recognizes that it is a frugal installed system. Of course these 2 programs are for Puppy Linux so the boot stanza's are generated for Puppy's and not KLV but that is an easy fix by manually adding the boot stanza's.

Even if Grub4Dos doesn't "see" the OS I'll let the program install the boot loader components and later I'll add the boot stanza's created by the add on program wd_grubconfig

My advice is run Grub4Dos and confirm letting it install the boot loader without worrying about the details of the generated menu.lst. Then add the correct boot stanza's to the menu.lst that is in the boot loader partition.

In a terminal use the command blkid to identify the UUID and or LABEL of the partitions. Then we can help write the correct boot stanza for your use case.

Looking for pup in the name of the frugal install directory(folder) is one thing it looks for to identify a puppy install.

Another big clue is finding the SFS files that should indicate it is a Puppy Linux version.
It is coded to look for specific named SFS files that should be in any Puppy frugal install.

After we see what actual files are in this studiopup directory(folder)
That will tell us if the SFS files it is looking for are there.

There are many other things used to try and identify the Linux OS, how it is installed, and try to make a working boot menu entry.

[stevie pup]

The first boot stanza does not look right.....let's try a simplified version:

Code: Select all

title Linux Studiopup 1337
   uuid 80e29c47-bce9-440b-aa7a-904fbf3b9aa2
   kernel /Studiopup_1137-3.3/vmlinuz
   initrd /Studiopup_1137-3.3/initrd.gz

We can add some parameters once we see if there is a need too.

Tried that, and there was some improvement, but we're not there yet. This time the boot process got a little further, but then failed at trying to find sfs.

@bigpup I'm using GRUB4DOS in Fossa9.5. Don't know what version that is but I've used it countless times, with a wide variety of Puppies, and never come across an issue like this before.

The other thing I can't get my head round is this. I downloaded the iso from the Googledrive link provided by @mikewalsh, then used uextract. Mike says that his works fine, so why mine is any different baffles me. Perhaps Mike can shed some light?

Contents of the directory are here.

[mikewalsh]

@stevie pup :-

Heh. I hope you didn't copy rockedge's boot stanza literally.....then try to boot from it.

It won't work like that; lines 3 and 4 show

"Studiopup_1137-3.3"

.....when it SHOULD be:-

"Studiopup_1337-3.3"

Mike.

[rockedge]

@stevie pup Also make sure the UUID number is the partition that has your frugal install directory on it. I used a UUID from another system for demonstration,

[stevie pup]

Heh. I hope you didn't copy rockedge's boot stanza literally.....then try to boot from it.

It won't work like that; lines 3 and 4 show

"Studiopup_1137-3.3"

.....when it SHOULD be:-

"Studiopup_1337-3.3"

Mike.

Thanks Mike but I had already spotted that. Thought perhaps it was a test to check I'm paying attention.

Also make sure the UUID number is the partition that has your frugal install directory on it. I used a UUID from another system for demonstration,

I've double checked this, and the UUID shown in Menu1st definitely matches what I see when I run BLKID.

Incidentally, I decided to give Jackalpup a spin yesterday, as I was under impression it is a similar type of Pup. So same procedure, frugal install then ran GRUB4DOS. No problems at all, and booted up fine. Unfortunately Jackal isn't as fully featured as Studio.