Init chooses puppy installation in sda7 regardless of which puppy installation media I'm booting from(solved)

[maleeqB]

I have fossapup64 on both of my flash drives (labeled sdb & sdc respectively), and also a frugal install on internal hdd on sda7.

When I boot into either the flash drives (using f12) and I get that grub2dos menu (that menu lists to either load normal fossapup, load sfs or don't load sfs files, ram only etc), when I click on first item, which is to boot directly into fossapup, the Fossapup installation in sda7 and its save folder is what gets picked up even though I boot into flash drive (sd2), and I have pupsave and sfs files on the flash drive too before I installed to sda7

I read somewhere now that init tries to search all partitions for the puppy files or something of sort, so I'm guessing it finds the files first at sda7 so it stopped there right? Even when I've cleared choosed to boot into flash drive (sdb) in bios

how do I then be able to boot into the fossapup and pupsave on my flash drive that is on sdb without pulling out my internal hdd all the time I want to do that?

[williwaw]

searching all partitions can happen in certian condtions and also, searching can be directed.

look for a grub.cfg or a menul.st on the thumb drive and post the contents.

also tell what program you used to write fossa to the thumb drives
and
hover your mouse over the thumbdrive partition in the lower left of the screen and report the filesystem type reportd in the popup

[maleeqB]

Thanks for your input.

Below is the content of grub.cfg in the flash drive's root folder :

Code: Select all

insmod part_acorn
insmod part_amiga
insmod part_apple
insmod part_bsd
insmod part_dfly
insmod part_dvh
insmod part_gpt
insmod part_msdos
insmod part_plan
insmod part_sun
insmod part_sunpc

loadfont /boot/grub/font.pf2
set gfxmode=800x600
set gfxpayload=keep

insmod efi_gop
insmod efi_uga

insmod all_video
insmod video_bochs
insmod video_cirrus
insmod gfxterm
insmod png
insmod jpeg
terminal_output gfxterm

insmod ext2
insmod f2fs
insmod ntfs
insmod exfat

insmod loopback
insmod iso9660
insmod udf

background_image /boot/splash.png
set timeout=10

# https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Displays
color_normal=cyan/black
#menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray
menu_color_highlight=yellow/red
menu_color_normal=light-gray/black

menuentry "fossapup64 9.5" {
    linux /vmlinuz pfix=fsck pmedia=cd
    initrd /initrd.gz
}

menuentry "fossapup64 9.5 - Copy SFS files to RAM" {
    linux /vmlinuz pfix=copy,fsck pmedia=cd
    initrd /initrd.gz
}

menuentry "fossapup64 9.5 - Don't copy SFS files to RAM" {
    linux /vmlinuz pfix=nocopy,fsck pmedia=cd
    initrd /initrd.gz
}

menuentry "fossapup64 9.5 - RAM only" {
    linux /vmlinuz pfix=ram,fsck pmedia=cd
    initrd /initrd.gz
}

menuentry "fossapup64 9.5 - No X" {
    linux /vmlinuz pfix=nox,fsck pmedia=cd
    initrd /initrd.gz
}

menuentry "fossapup64 9.5 - No KMS (Kernel modesetting)" {
    linux /vmlinuz nomodeset pfix=fsck pmedia=cd
    initrd /initrd.gz
}

menuentry "fossapup64 9.5 - Ram Disk SHell" {
    linux /vmlinuz pfix=rdsh pmedia=cd
    initrd /initrd.gz
}

menuentry "Shutdown" {
	halt
}

menuentry "Reboot" {
	reboot
}

and regarding the second question, I used Rufus to write fossapup to the flash drive.

Also when I hovered the mouse over the drive's partition it shows : Filesystem: vfat

[williwaw]

in your grub.cfg you can try to change

menuentry "fossapup64 9.5" {
linux /vmlinuz pfix=fsck pmedia=cd
initrd /initrd.gz
}

to pmedia=usbflash and see what happens
there are other choices, see the first paragraph in
viewtopic.php?t=5484

if the above does not work, and you can confirm you actually have save on the usb, and it is not being picked up, then adding a psubdir parameter may do the trick... see the second paragrarph in the link above

[maleeqB]

Thank you so much for your help

I tried all sort of edits on that [textcolors=red]grub.cfg[/textcolors] in the root of the flash drive but I wasn't seeing any changes.

I got suspicious and even moved the grub.cfg to grub.cfg.bak, rebooted into flash drive and It still boots normally to the internal hdd . So I started looking for which config file it might be using

I saw a boot folder with a grub subfolder on the root of the flash drive. I performed all sort of edits on the grub.cfg in that subfolder yet same behavior.

Then I realized there's a menu.lst in that subfolder and when I changed to pmedia=usbflash, that's when I get desired behavior and it only boots into flash drive

So now everything works fine. Thanks for your help

Now quick question, why menu.lst and not grub.cfg? Why does grub4dos picks menu.lst instead of grub config file and what are the difference?

Also please how did you add that red coloured text in pmedia=... ? I tried [textcolors=red]grub.cfg[/textcolors] but output shows as "[textcolors=red]grub.cfg[/textcolors]"

[esos]

How do I then be able to boot into the fossapup and pupsave on my flash drive that is on sdb without pulling out my internal hdd all the time I want to do that?

It is only about boot stanza psave=/path/*save

[Jafadmin]

I always recommend booting by disk/partition UUID to alleviate these types of issues

Code: Select all

menuentry 'FossaPup64-9.5' {
	linux	/fossa/vmlinuz   root=UUID=47028e70-a6cf-43bc-807a-5ee09688d97c   psubdir=fossa pmedia=usbflash pfix=fsck
	initrd	/fossa/initrd.gz
}

[bigpup]

Now quick question, why menu.lst and not grub.cfg? Why does grub4dos picks menu.lst instead of grub config file and what are the difference?

menu.lst is the file that is used by grub4dos boot loader.
It is the config file for grub4dos.

grub.cfg is the file used by grub2 boot loader.

They both do the same thing, to provide the configuration of the boot loaders, boot menu.

All Puppy ISO's come with both boot loaders in them that get installed.
grub4dos is for legacy bios booting.
grub2 is for UEFI bios booting.

The boot loader config files are setup for booting from an install to a CD/DVD.
Thus it has pmedia=cd in the boot menu entry in the boot loader config file.

The pmedia=cd tells the boot process to boot for booting from a CD install, where the files could be on the internal drive, so it will boot faster.
That is an option, when making the save, to also put some of the Puppy files on the internal drive.
Plus usually a CD boot will have the save on the internal drive, because the CD is read only and cannot be written to.

pmedia= tells the boot process what type device it is booting from.
different devices have different ways the boot process works.

[bigpup]

I tried [textcolors=red]grub.cfg[/textcolors] but output shows as "[textcolors=red]grub.cfg[/textcolors]"

It is color not colors and text is not anyplace in the command.

Text color in a post.

color

Just highlight the text.

Click on the color icon and choose a color to use.

If you hover over that icon it tells you the way to enter it if you want to manually do it.
.

Screenshot(3).jpg (48.41 KiB) Viewed 457 times

.
.

[williwaw]

yes, grub4dos uses menu.lst, but there is another bootloader called grub2config which uses grub.cfg and you mentioned using grub2dos...
you may have both bootloaders installed, grub4dos is for mbr boot and grub2config is for UEFI boot. Perhaps your machine is only capable of mbr boot, or if it is capable of both UEFI boot and mbr boot, you bios may be configured for legacy only (mbr) and the UEFI (grub2config with grub.cfg) is ignored

glad your fixed, and welcome to the forum

[maleeqB]

Thank you so much for your help @bigpup , @Jafadmin and @williwaw

I've learned a lot from this. Using the disk's UUID as Jafadmin suggested seems the best way to guarantee consistency

thanks a lot bigpup for that lecture about pmedia=cd, I was thinking it is some sorts of change directory to search all directories or something but now I understand the history behind it