Newbie gets message "No suitable partitions found" on attempt to install to HDD

[Andy Kay]

So sorry if this has been asked a hundred times before but I find these forums a bit bewildering.

Toshiba Stallite U300-14B
Model PSU30E-04M01SEN
Originally installed with Microsoft Vista Home Premium

Puppypc26924
Bookworm Pup64
Linux 6.1.38

Presently running from DVD and I would like to install to HDD. I go to the Puppy Installer and select "Frugalpup - Install/manage installs."
Then I select the "Puppy" button to set up a frugal install and I'm presented with a window within which I select "This Puppy."
Then I'm presented with a window that says "No suitable partitions found." This is the point at which my technical abilities end.

Any help with how I should proceed would be greatly appreciated.

[mikeslr]

My initial guess is that all your partitions are formatted as ntfs. Boot up Bookworm Pup64 from the DVD. Open Menu>System>GParted, select your hard-drive and then let us known what formats the partitions on the hard-drive have.

[Andy Kay]

Thanks Mike. I get:

Partition = /dev/sr0
File System = iso 9660
Label = CDROM
Size = 747.00 MiB

Hmmm.... beginning to look like there's no HDD. Could be, since I was asked if I wanted the laptop prior to binning it, and the original owner may have (not unreasonably) removed the HDD first for security.

But then again when I hover the cursor over the little drum icon in the system tray it says 1.6GiB personal storage, free space 931MiB.

[rockedge]

But then again when I hover the cursor over the little drum icon in the system tray it says 1.6GiB personal storage, free space 931MiB.

That is probably the RAM storage of 2G!

[bigpup]

First thing is to make sure it does have an internal drive.

When you boot BookwormPup64 DVD.

On the bottom of the desktop should be icons for the different drives.
sr0 is usually the DVD drive.

Any other drives the computer has and that are working, should be sda or sdb or sdd, etc.........
There will be an icon for each partition the drive has.

Example:
sda drive with two partitions on it.
Two desktop icons. sda1 and sda2.

So what drive icons are you seeing on the desktop????

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

The installers that are only Puppy are designed for installing where Puppy is the only operating system that will be on the drive.

Is this how you want the internal drive if there is one?????

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

Sounds like you tried to use the Frugalpup Installer.
It does need the drive partitioned and formatted a specific way before it will do an install to it.

But before we get you doing that.

Need to have answers to the above questions!!!!!!
.
.
.

[bigpup]

Puppypc26924
Bookworm Pup64
Linux kernel 6.1.38

This is not the latest version of BookwormPup64

You need to be using BookwormPup64 v10.0.6
It uses Linux kernel 6.1.76, which does provide some needed updates.
And this newer version fixes some bugs and overall improvements.

You can get it here:
viewtopic.php?t=8690

[Andy Kay]

So what drive icons are you seeing on the desktop????

Only sr0 showing on the desktop. No HDD then. Previous owner must have removed it before giving the laptop to me. No puppy for me then.

[Wiz57]

So what drive icons are you seeing on the desktop????

Only sr0 showing on the desktop. No HDD then. Previous owner must have removed it before giving the laptop to me. No puppy for me then.

Sure there is a Puppy for you! Puppies boot and operate quite well from a USB thumb drive! Obtain one with
at least 4 gb storage, 8 gb better, 16 gb probably best, and you can install 2 or 3 Pups of different flavors...
such as your BookwormPup, or one of the Slackware based, I like Peabee's S15Pup myself. With a thumb
drive of sufficient capacity you can save your settings, preferences, downloaded programs, etc to the thumb
drive just as if it were an internal HDD...maybe not as fast as say an SSD drive, but probably as quick as the
older spinning disk HDDs.!
Wiz

[rockedge]

@Andy Kay does the laptop have USB ports?

Might be possible to boot from the CD-ROM and use a properly formatted USB drive for saving the sessions...or boot and run a Puppy Linux from the USB drive like it's a HDD.

I have a 2002 IBM T-42 ThinkPad that has no battery no hard drive. Both devices died but it can boot from a USB port, so with USB flash drive of 16G which the machine can treat like a HDD. Not the most elegant solution and the laptop's CPU doesn't support PAE and needs kernel command line forcepae to use Tahr-6.0.5, and I was using it to test Puppy Linux OS experiments but limited to 32 bit now it only sits on on a shelf in a closet.

[Andy Kay]

Sure there is a Puppy for you! Puppies boot and operate quite well from a USB thumb drive! Obtain one with
at least 4 gb storage, 8 gb better, 16 gb probably best, and you can install 2 or 3 Pups of different flavors...
such as your BookwormPup, or one of the Slackware based, I like Peabee's S15Pup myself. With a thumb
drive of sufficient capacity you can save your settings, preferences, downloaded programs, etc to the thumb
drive just as if it were an internal HDD...maybe not as fast as say an SSD drive, but probably as quick as the
older spinning disk HDDs.!
Wiz

Thanks Wiz. A little history of my efforts seems in order then. I created a boot file of Linux Mint Cinnamon on a USB using Balena Etcher ready to use with this laptop. I entered the boot menu by pressing F2 on startup and went to the boot order tab, which showed only CD-ROM or LAN. With no boot from USB available I burned a DVD and ran that, but when I tried to install it onto the HDD it said insufficient space available, 16.1GB required. This is why I pursued the Puppy Linux route.

Incidentally I succeeded in installing Mint on another (much younger) laptop's HDD. I actually prefer the older laptop's build quality so I was hoping to get Linux running on it but it looks like fate is conspiring against me. At least I can start getting used to Mint now as I really don't want to move to Windows 11.

[Andy Kay]

@Andy Kay does the laptop have USB ports?

Might be possible to boot from the CD-ROM and use a properly formatted USB drive for saving the sessions...or boot and run a Puppy Linux from the USB drive like it's a HDD.

I have a 2002 IBM T-42 ThinkPad that has no battery no hard drive. Both devices died but it can boot from a USB port, so with USB flash drive of 16G which the machine can treat like a HDD. Not the most elegant solution and the laptop's CPU doesn't support PAE and needs kernel command line forcepae to use Tahr-6.0.5, and I was using it to test Puppy Linux OS experiements but limited to 32 bit now it only sits on on a shelf in a closet.

More details in my reply to Wiz but it appears that this laptop is too old to boot from USB. Running from CD-ROM is painfully slow, but I do have a backup now (another laptop that I succeeded in installing Mint on).

[rockedge]

More details in my reply to Wiz but it appears that this laptop is too old to boot from USB.

Ever try the PLOP boot manager? It can be burned to CD-ROM and after booting it first, PLOP can enable booting from the USB ports on machines that are too old to have BIOS that can boot from the USB ports.

To get to PLOP click HERE

[wizard]

@Andy Kay

Couldn't find out much about your Toshiba, but looks like from about 2007 and it could be a Intel dual core. Boot Pup then:
Menu>System>Pup Sysinfo

This should let you find the CPU and ram memory, let us know what those are.

Also, if it is a dual core it can probably boot from USB. Insert a USB flash drive, then boot into bios and look for a setting like "boot order". If you find that set the USB as the first boot device.

wizard

[Luluc]

Of course people are helping you quite well, but I get nervous about this HD/no HD situation because it's hard to tell for sure. Can you please open a terminal session, run this command...

# fdisk -l

(it's a dash and the small letter L at the end)

...and copy/paste the output? That will really establish the truth on whether you have a hard disk or not.

[cobaka]

Hi @Andy Kay and a hearty "woof" to you.

Here are the specs for your notebook:
The link -> https://support.dynabook.com/support/st ... Link=false

Satellite U300-NS2,
Intel® Pentium® Dual Core processor T2080– 1.73GHz,
There are three USB 2.0 ports available.
It seems the satellite series were sold from 2007 to about 2016.

I run uPupBB32 on a Dell 8600 (Pentium M series CPU). This is an older laptop than yours.
I had to upgrade RAM to 2GiB to get reasonable performance.
The CPU in your Toshiba is 64bit and therefore more capable than the Pentium in the DELL 8600 I have.

It seems you have 2GiB RAM - enough to run a modest puppy.
Since you can boot Puppy from a CD/DVD you have overcome the most difficult stage in getting "The Puppy" up and working.

It's important to remember that "Puppy" isn't a single OS (like Mint etc), but a collection of Operating Systems - all with the same 'generic' name but built using different kernels. You can choose one Puppy from the collection. I know one will suit your need. After that: I suggest you read my observations below.

-> Do you have two or three thumb-drives to install a different Puppy? <- Then, the method I mention below will quickly allow you to install/test the various Puppies available.

I won't write an installation encyclopedia - in fact, I'll give a link from this forum where MikeSLR describes one method to install Puppy Linux. I won't read his method to check whether it deals with installation to a thumb-drive (or only hard drive). If you have any problem installing Puppy to your thumb-drive - let me know. I wrote some additional notes; but for the moment I think it's better if I point you to Mike's work.

Link: viewtopic.php?p=46867#p46867

My only comment is that Mike gives detail so complete his very simple method may appear a little difficult.

Again: Let me know if you can't install and boot Puppy.
I DO recomment you buy a s/hand HDD for your Toshiba. Additionally, I dislike laptop keyboards, mice and so on. I use a USB docking station. That gives me "heaps" of USB ports - mouse, kbd, other drives and so on. Again, this is on a DELL 8600 from 2005 and it works well with uPupBB32 (or 'Friendly Puppy'). Yes, it's takes a longer time to run YouTube videos, but once the video is 'going' - it 'goes' well.

Good luck. Let me know how your installation 'goes' and 'woof'.

cobaka

[bigpup]

Looking in the manual for your computer.

Under bios settings.

Boot Priority Options
This option sets the priority for booting the computer.
To select the boot drive you want, follow the steps below.
1. Boot-up your computer and press F12 to enter the boot menu.
2. The boot select screen will be displayed: Hard disk Drive, CD/DVD,
FDD and LAN.

Another bios setting for USB.

USB
USB Keyboard/Mouse/FDD Legacy Emulation
Use this option to enable or disable Legacy USB support. If your operating
system does not support USB, you can still use a USB mouse, keyboard,
and FDD by setting the Legacy USB Support to enable.

This seems to indicate that a USB stick plugged in could be seen as a FDD in the boot device selection options.

So try booting from a USB by making the boot device selection FDD.

[mikewalsh]

@Andy Kay :- Hallo.......and to the "kennels"!

If what @wizard and @cobaka have discovered about your machine is true, then I'll eat my hat if it won't boot from USB. Truly I will!

I had an even older Dell Inspiron from around 2002, with a single-core, 32-bit only Pentium 4.....and that would boot from USB. Mind you, I will admit.....Dell always were early adopters of new technology, and that Inspiron was one of the very first consumer laptops on the market to come with the USB boot feature. Some manufacturers didn't get around to incorporating this ability for another 3-4 years after that.

By the time the Core2Duos came along, their chipset supported the feature as standard.......yet even the previous-gen Pentium Dual-Cores would perform the same "party piece", so this shouldn't be a limiting factor in any way.

M'colleague's points about the FDD might be worth bearing in mind. Even if that doesn't 'play ball', there's still the PLOP option.......or, you could splash out a wee bit of cash on a cheapo SSD. Doesn't need to be owt special; so long as it'll fit inside, connect, and the BIOS/OS 'sees' it, you're in business.

There's a whole RAFT of options available yet.....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It's probably fair to say that most of the forum "regulars" here all have 'our Pup' installed to & running from an internal drive of one sort or another. But with Puppy, this is NOT a hard'n'fast requirement, by any means. In fact, you'd be amazed at some of the weird & wonderful hardware combos we DO like playing around with.......often, stuff that any "normal" Windoze user would have tossed in the trash years previously! Just because it won't run Windoze, does NOT make it useless....

Puppy can run on almost anything. Literally. Your machine is a prime Puppy candidate; all you need is a drive of some sort.....whether external flash/HDD/SSD, makes no difference ATM. A USB flash drive will be the simplest and easiest route, I think. Despite having USB 2.0 ports, I'd recommend a USB 3.0 flash drive; they may not "match", per se, but a USB 3.0 in a USB 2.0 port will still run faster than a USB 2.0 will. Experience has taught me that!

(Here's an example:- The anciente Inspiron finally died a couple of years back, but for the last 5 years of its life I'd been running an SSD in it, designed to work with the older IDE/PATA standard. When the Dell made its way to the great scrapheap in the sky, I rescued the SSD before she disappeared.

That SSD is now sitting in an enclosure I made out of an old Compaq floppy disk storage box I'd had sitting around for ages. Courtesy of a PATA-to-SATA adapter - £2 off eBay - it connects to my big HP desktop rig via a SATA-to-USB 3.0 adapter cable.......and is currently booting ChromeOS (just for the hell of it)! )

"Our Pup" is nowt if not versatile!!

Mike.

[Andy Kay]

Ever try the PLOP boot manager? It can be burned to CD-ROM and after booting it first, PLOP can enable booting from the USB ports on machines that are too old to have BIOS that can boot from the USB ports.

To get to PLOP click HERE

Thanks Rockedge! Definitely going to investigate that!

[Andy Kay]

Of course people are helping you quite well, but I get nervous about this HD/no HD situation because it's hard to tell for sure. Can you please open a terminal session, run this command...

# fdisk -l

(it's a dash and the small letter L at the end)

...and copy/paste the output? That will really establish the truth on whether you have a hard disk or not.

It's official... I opened up the laptop and the HDD is absent.

[Andy Kay]

This is not the latest version of BookwormPup64

You need to be using BookwormPup64 v10.0.6
It uses Linux kernel 6.1.76, which does provide some needed updates.
And this newer version fixes some bugs and overall improvements.

You can get it here:
viewtopic.php?t=8690

Doh! As usual it's my unexamined assumptions that have tripped me up. I assumed that the boot loader would give me the option to boot from USB without me having to actually have a USB memory stick inserted. I have now downloaded v10.0.6 from the link you provided, used Balena Etcher to put it on a USB memory stick, inserted the stick, started up the machine and entered the boot loader. Lo and behold it gave me the option to boot from USB, so I made that top priority and continued. I am now running Puppy from USB! Thrilled to have gotten this far with the help of everyone on this forum. You guys are great!

[williwaw]

This is not the latest version of BookwormPup64

You need to be using BookwormPup64 v10.0.6
It uses Linux kernel 6.1.76, which does provide some needed updates.
And this newer version fixes some bugs and overall improvements.

You can get it here:
viewtopic.php?t=8690

Doh! As usual it's my unexamined assumptions that have tripped me up. I assumed that the boot loader would give me the option to boot from USB without me having to actually have a USB memory stick inserted. I have now downloaded v10.0.6 from the link you provided, used Balena Etcher to put it on a USB memory stick, inserted the stick, started up the machine and entered the boot loader. Lo and behold it gave me the option to boot from USB, so I made that top priority and continued. I am now running Puppy from USB! Thrilled to have gotten this far with the help of everyone on this forum. You guys are great!

Andy,
glad you got sorted with the satellite. those are cool old machines.
If you hover your mouse over the usb icon in the lower left of the screen and see that you are booting an 9660 iso, you are in a live boot,
but
puppy offers so much more with persistence. unfortunately an install with balena may not get you there, and you should not neglect to consider a frugal install
viewtopic.php?t=5313
viewtopic.php?t=5209

live or iso installs are a good way to try out some different puppies tho

[wizard]

@Andy Kay

+1 on what @williwaw said, remake your USB using frugalpup so you can save your changes, etc.

Also, on one of my computers with similar CPU power and 2gb ram, F96CE_4 was a better choice since it did not take as much ram. If you remake the USB, you can also edit the grub kernel line to use: pfix=nocopy. This will give you about 300mb more available ram.

wizard

[Andy Kay]

@Andy Kay

Couldn't find out much about your Toshiba, but looks like from about 2007 and it could be a Intel dual core. Boot Pup then:
Menu>System>Pup Sysinfo

This should let you find the CPU and ram memory, let us know what those are.

Also, if it is a dual core it can probably boot from USB. Insert a USB flash drive, then boot into bios and look for a setting like "boot order". If you find that set the USB as the first boot device.

wizard

Yes, the BIOS is dated 2007 and it is Intel dual core. No HDD (I opened up the back and looked) but 2GB of RAM installed. Your comment above hinted to me that I might be making a false assumption that the BIOS would offer me a "boot from USB" option without needing a USB memory stick inserted, so I tried inserting the memory stick before entering BIOS and the option appeared! I'm now running Puppy from the USB stick. Will look into acquiring an HDD for it. Thanks Wizard.

[Andy Kay]

Hi @Andy Kay and a hearty "woof" to you.
...
cobaka

That's a useful link thanks Cobaka. I will play with the Puppy variants when I have the time now that I'm more confident about what I'm doing.

[Andy Kay]

@Andy Kay :- Hallo.......and to the "kennels"!
....
Mike.

Thanks for the welcome Mike. Now I'm gaining confidence and also a growing appreciation of this particular notebook (the build quality is superb) I've decided it's worth spdending a few quid on a small SSD for it. This is a great forum!

[Andy Kay]

Andy,
glad you got sorted with the satellite. those are cool old machines.
If you hover your mouse over the usb icon in the lower left of the screen and see that you are booting an 9660 iso, you are in a live boot,
but
puppy offers so much more with persistence. unfortunately an install with balena may not get you there, and you should not neglect to consider a frugal install
viewtopic.php?t=5313
viewtopic.php?t=5209

live or iso installs are a good way to try out some different puppies tho

You're right... I'd forgotten all about frugal install. Thanks Williwaw.

[wizard]

@Andy Kay

Will look into acquiring an HDD for it.

Spec says it has a 2.5 inch SATA interface drive. Highly recommend using a Sata SSD since it will be much faster. I've used several 128gb Samsungs bought on Ebay for about $10 US. They're fast and reliable.

Bonus for using a SSD is you can move the laptop around while it's running (a no-no for HDD's).

wizard

[bigpup]

If you do anymore installs to USB.

Use the programs in Puppy Linux to do it.

The different Stickpup installers are for installing to a USB stick.

BookwormPup64 10.0.6 has the latest versions.

[bigpup]

Hello @Andy Kay

Now you have a version of Puppy 'up and running' from your USB thumb-drive some info about directories and drives will be useful.
MikeSLR wrote an interesting posting here: -> https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... ree#p86795

It's halfway down the page.

On the topic of thumb-drives: How many GiB was the drive where you installed Puppy?
Another thing: It's useful to keep a bootable CD/DVD or thumb-drive "in the drawer" as a back-up.
Because Puppy runs on "just about anything" I even keep a smaller "running system" under the table for those rare times when my main PC "falls over". With this - you can locate those odd things you need to restore your system when something goes wrong. Rarely needed, but most useful when it is.

About setting the boot device in the BIOS, @bigpup mentioned setting USB - FDD.
I have this option on my desktop; I also have USB - HDD. I always used "HDD" - never FDD.
Perhaps both options will work?

Great to hear you have Puppy booting.
Suggestion: Buy one or two 'spare' thumb-drives and experiment installing/running different versions of Puppy.

All the best.

cobaka.