I'm doing something wrong when writing Puppy .ISO files to USB thumbdrives. But I don't know what.

[grey38]

I had been previously using Puppy for personal projects on older 32 bit computers. I'm not a knowledgeable programmer so all the built in tools have been REALLY helpful for me.

But something is wrong now and I can't figure out what. I've wanted to do use it again and I've used my Linux Mint desktop to download NoblePup32, and JammyPup32, and BookwormPup32 and write them to a thumbdrive. I used the built in Mint tool to write it to thumbdrive.

The short version is that none of them boot. They get stuck on a screen I don't normally see and I don't know what to do with. I have attached a photo of the screen that I see on each of them. I only really need one because it's mostly the same on all of them.

I started with NoblePup32. I used Mints "USB image writer" tool to write it to a thumbdrive and tried to boot it on a laptop. It went to that error screen I have uploaded a photo. I tried it on a different laptop and got the same error screen. I thought maybe something was wrong with the thumbdrive so I used a different one, wrote NoblePup32 and tried it on both laptops and got the same error screen. So I attempted the same process with JammyPup32 instead.

With JammyPup32 I wrote to both thumbdrives and and tried to boot both of them on both laptops. Again, I got the error screen I have uploaded a photo of.

I then tried BookwormPup32 on both thumbdrives and both laptops. This one was slightly different! It seems like it might boot, but then just gets stuck on an all black screen instead of error screen from before.

So it's not the laptops, it's not the thumbdrives, it's not the Puppys I'm using. So it must be me or the Mint tool I use to write Puppys to thumbdrives.

Could anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? I've eliminated everything else. I love Puppy and I want to keep working with it. Does anyone know what I should do different?

Thanks in advance for reading.

[Wiz57]

Instead of using Linux Mint's tools to create the USB drive, use unetbootin. Mint, IIRC, wants to default to using Grub, not Grub4Dos, as the bootloader...
hence the error "load not found".

[williwaw]

you could download a puppy tool while in mint and use it instead of the mint tool to write a puppy to one of USBs. Work from there to set up your preferred thumbdrive with multiple puppies and a new bootloader.

or easiest might be to easydd an easyos image to a USB for doing the installs.
download easydd https://bkhome.org/files/easydd.gz
instructions at
https://bkhome.org/linux/easydd-write-i ... drive.html

latest easy
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 46#p130646

[dimkr]

It's a bug in grub4dos, something known for many years. Most Puppy releases have this issue but some don't (BookwormPup64 doesn't) and I still haven't figured out why.

If I understand correctly (I could be wrong), unetbootin should work fine because it doesn't write the ISO directly to the flash drive and installs its own boot loader instead.

[bugnaw333]

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=12576

Please read Barry`s explanation on the last page.

[stevie pup]

When I tried Bookworm64 with Unetbootin it wouldn't boot. Displayed error message to say it couldn't find something or other (sorry, can't remember what), then kernel panic.

[wizard]

@stevie pup

Just used MS Windows 10 and Unetbootin to make a BookwormPup64 10.0.7 USB drive. Booted without issues on both UEFI and MBR computers. Would need more details if you want to troubleshoot.

Thanks
wizard

[stevie pup]

@wizard I wasn't using Windows, I was running Unetbootin with MX Linux. All my laptops are fairly old, so all MBR only. So at least no UEFI to mess things up.

When I get chance I'll give it another go, and assuming it still fails I'll make a proper note of what the error message says.

Thanks

[Wiz57]

@wizard I wasn't using Windows, I was running Unetbootin with MX Linux. All my laptops are fairly old, so all MBR only. So at least no UEFI to mess things up.

When I get chance I'll give it another go, and assuming it still fails I'll make a proper note of what the error message says.

Thanks

The unetbootin guide may help, particularly the formatting the USB thumb drive as FAT32
https://github.com/unetbootin/unetbootin/wiki/guide

Also, if you can find it on the USB drive, post contents of grub.cfg, or menu.lst (grub4dos) or syslinux.cfg (IIRC is what it is called)
It's possible something as simple as the UUID needing added to the boot "stanza" to tell the bootloader where the puppy files are,
may also need pdrv , psubdir, etc.

[stevie pup]

@wizard @Wiz57

Thank you both for your responses. I've had another go and this time it works perfectly. In fact I thought it booted faster than some other set ups I've used previously, so I'm pleased. So what have I done differently? Simple, used a different USB stick! The other one was quite old and had been used a lot so I think it may have had it's day.

Also apologies to the OP, can't help feeling I've hijacked this thread a bit.

[wizard]

@stevie pup

My USB flash drives seem to get "confused" after a lot of use. Using Gparted to re-create the MSDOS partition table seems to help sometimes.

wizard

[grey38]

you could download a puppy tool while in mint and use it instead of the mint tool to write a puppy to one of USBs. Work from there to set up your preferred thumbdrive with multiple puppies and a new bootloader.

or easiest might be to easydd an easyos image to a USB for doing the installs.
download easydd https://bkhome.org/files/easydd.gz
instructions at
https://bkhome.org/linux/easydd-write-i ... drive.html

latest easy
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 46#p130646

Thank you, firstly. This looks like the right tool for what I am trying to do, but I can't get it to run on Mint. I get this error

>ERROR: These utilities are missing:
>gtkdialog

I've googled it and it seems like this is not a regular package for Mint. Is there something similar that exists that can replace it?

[BarryK]

It seems that some of the recent pups have misconfigured iso files, that won't boot on a usb flash drive.
I posted about it here:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 34#p130634

All of the mainstream Linux distros ship iso's as "hybrid iso" so they will boot from usb drive.

The above link has a link that shows how you can test if your iso is not hybrid, and how it can be made into hybrid.

If any pup developer, bookworm pup or whatever, is creating iso's that are not hybrid, it should be brought to their attention.

Why not bootup EasyOS, that has easydd builtin?

EasyOS ships as a drive-image file, not an iso, that you write to the flash drive using a tool like USB Image Writer, or even just 'dd'
ex: # dd if=easy-6.3.1-amd64.img of=/dev/sdc bs=1M
Then boot it.

Easy 6.3.1 announced here:
https://bkhome.org/news/202409/easyos-s ... eased.html

The Easy 6.0 announcement has some getting-started links that may be useful:
https://bkhome.org/news/202406/easyos-s ... eased.html

You might find this a useful read, describes easydd and Windows USB Image Tool:
https://easyos.org/install/how-to-write ... drive.html

...that explains you can run easydd in CLI mode, that doesn't require gtkdialog and so should work in Linux Mint.

[radky]

It seems that some of the recent pups have misconfigured iso files, that won't boot on a usb flash drive.
I posted about it here:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 34#p130634

All of the mainstream Linux distros ship iso's as "hybrid iso" so they will boot from usb drive.

The above link has a link that shows how you can test if your iso is not hybrid, and how it can be made into hybrid.

If any pup developer, bookworm pup or whatever, is creating iso's that are not hybrid, it should be brought to their attention.

@BarryK and @dimkr

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/how-to- ... oot/146392

As a test, I followed directives provided in the above link to check the hybrid status of the BookwormPup64 iso.

For comparison, I also checked 2 additional Woof-CE distros released in iso format:

1 - BookwormPup64_10.0.8.iso (local Woof-CE build by radky, released, Sep 2024)
2 - fossapup64-9.5.iso (local Woof-CE build by 666philb, released Sep 2020)
3 - vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso (github build via dimkr's fork of Woof-CE, released Sep 2024)

Checking Hybrid Status:

# file /root/BookwormPup64_10.0.8.iso
/root//BookwormPup64_10.0.8.iso: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data (DOS/MBR boot sector) 'ISOIMAGE' (bootable)

# file /root/fossapup64-9.5.iso
/root/fossapup64-9.5.iso: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data (DOS/MBR boot sector) 'CDROM' (bootable)

# file /root/vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso
/root/vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data (DOS/MBR boot sector) 'ISOIMAGE' (bootable)

---

If I understand correctly, the above Woof-CE distros were finalized by a call to isohbyrid to create the "hybrid iso".

The requisite /us/bin/isohybrid binary is present in the host build environment.

No error messages ae generated.

[mikewalsh]

@Wiz57 / @wizard :-

Another vote here for UNetbootin. I know it's been around, like, FOREVER.....but to this day, it's always been my "go-to" USB install creator when other methods go tits-up. And it always seems to just "work".

I don't question the code behind it. I just use it..!

Mike.

[dimkr]

@radky I'm pretty confident that some past version was fine, maybe it was 10.0.6. I spent several hours trying to understand why BookwormPup64 is hybrid while all of @peebee's ISOs aren't, but gave up at some point.

[peebee]

I spent several hours trying to understand why BookwormPup64 is hybrid while all of @peebee's ISOs aren't, but gave up at some point.

All??? All my iso's (apart from LxPupSc) are built on Github by standard Github Actions - how can they NOT be hybrid???????? During the local Woof-CE build of LxPupSc I see a "making ISO hybrid" message.........

[dimkr]

@peebee Take an ISO and check if it boots fine with both qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -cdrom whatever.iso and qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -drive format=raw,file=whatever.iso. You'll see that some do and some don't.

(This should be equivalent to checking if they boot from both an optical drive and when written directly to a flash drive)
(woof-CE prints many things during the build process, some of them are misleading or incorrect)

[ozsouth]

I ran: file S15Pup64-22.12-240717.iso & got:

S15Pup64-22.12-240717.iso: ISO 9660 CD-ROM filesystem data (DOS/MBR boot sector) 'ISOIMAGE' (bootable)

So that should be bootable? From radky's link above it has a bit of each output, but DOS/MBR boot sector is there & running isohybrid does nothing.

[peebee]

I've never used qemu and see no need to start now.

"This should be equivalent" - maybe it isn't - please amend the previous post to say it refers to qemu booting - not to direct usb booting.

https://github.com/puppylinux-woof-CE/w ... so.sh#L384

[Clarity]

As MOST members know, for the past 5 years, I do NOT extract content from ISO files nor modify a master system boot menu for booting all forum distros. I merely boot the downloaded distro's ISO file directly to their desktops providing a normal frugal operation. This negates issues that most members have when using extraction methods.

I also post booting results for each developer's distro from the PLDF. My results along with other forum member(s) sharing their results are posted in this area of the forum (see for yourself).

The developers ISO files are booted and reported when launched via the following:

• SG2D (on bare-metal as well as within a KVM)

• Ventoy (on bare-metal as well as within a KVM)

• QEMU

• PXE

@radky, each of the distros you show in your post above, successfully boot from their ISOs.

Currently @fatdog is the ONLY forum distro capable of booting its ISO via a PXE server (thus, no media with an ISO file is needed at the local machine to get to a desktop and operate frugally). Their boot magic is in their init produced by @jamesbond and @kirk .

Currently, too, the KL developers have an INIT process that if there is a predefined "Persistence" partition, KLs will both discover and save user "Sessions" accordingly with NO user effort necessary.

[dimkr]

I've never used qemu and see no need to start now.

I don't understand this skeptic view of VMs and I wonder if you test the ISOs you publish on physical hardware, or just don't test them at all.

EDIT: qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -drive format=raw,file=VoidPup64-22.02-240919.iso reproduces OP's error (consistent with what I saw in multiple ISOs in https://sourceforge.net/projects/pb-gh-releases/files/) - BookwormPup64_10.0.8.iso boots fine

[bugnaw333]

@BarryK

It seems that some of the recent pups have misconfigured iso files, that won't boot on a usb flash drive.
I posted about it here:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 34#p130634

Matrix results attached:
1. S15Pup64-22.12-240919.iso---NO Problem (It has iso9660 ISOIMAGE)
2. Both F96-CE_4.iso and BookwormPup64_10.0.8.iso --- NO boot (iso9660 CDROM) using EasyDD and Etcher.

[williwaw]

@BarryK

It seems that some of the recent pups have misconfigured iso files, that won't boot on a usb flash drive.
I posted about it here:

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic. ... 34#p130634

Matrix results attached:
1. S15Pup64-22.12-240919.iso---NO Problem (It has iso9660 ISOIMAGE) :thumbup2:
2. Both F96-CE_4.iso and BookwormPup64_10.0.8.iso --- NO boot (iso9660 CDROM) :thumbdown: using EasyDD and Etcher.

bugnaw,
did you try to run # isohybrid [/path/to/ISO] on the failures as suggested in the linked page barry pointed to?
I wonder if using the -u option is always neccesary if booting with UEFI

[wizard]

@williwaw

Both F96 and BW64 were created using isohybrid and it is advised not to run it more than once, so don't think that will help. Both are already hybrids and will boot from USB flash drives created with Unetbootin or Rufus. BW64's topic specifically recommends Unetbootin and Rufus.

User can also reference this document in Getting Started and System Requirements:
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=5192

Don't think the forum has ever recommend Balena Etchher as it creates an ISO 9660 read only format that prevents use of a save file/folder on the USB. The document above specifically cautions against using alternate installation programs.

Thanks
wizard

[dimkr]

Interesting finding: woof-CE runs isohybrid with -u.

If I take an ISO with this problem, all 4 options work once I run isohybrid vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso:

Code: Select all

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -drive format=raw,file=vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso -bios /usr/share/qemu/OVMF.fd 
qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -drive format=raw,file=vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso
qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -cdrom vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso -bios /usr/share/qemu/OVMF.fd 
qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -cdrom vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso

(UEFI boot from non-optical media, BIOS boot from non-optical media, UEFI boot from optical media, BIOS boot from optical media)

If I run isohybrid -u vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso, only these two options work:

Code: Select all

qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -cdrom vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso -bios /usr/share/qemu/OVMF.fd 
qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -m 2048 -cdrom vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso

(Same two options that work if I don't do anything to the ISO)

EDIT: trying to reproduce same experiment with VoidPup64-22.02-240919.iso, now I see that UEFI boot from optical media after isohybrid without -u fails - maybe I was also wrong with vanilladpup-10.0.62.iso

[wizard]

@dimkr

Check your PM

Thanks
wizard

[williwaw]

Don't think the forum has ever recommend Balena Etchher as it creates an ISO 9660 read only format that prevents use of a save file/folder on the USB. The document above specifically cautions against using alternate installation programs.

Thanks
wizard

To clarify, my suggestion to bugnaw was for a followup test. Even if savefolders are not desired with ISO 9660 installs, should boot-ability be affected?

and it is advised not to run it more than once,

thats good to know. perhaps the .iso's used for experimentation should be replaced with fresh downloads if used for working installations.

Could hybrid iso boot problems from installs made with balena and dd also be affected by hardware differences?

[wizard]

@williwaw

Even if savefolders are not desired with ISO 9660 installs, should boot-ability be affected?

Shouldn't be, but Balena Etcher has historically failed with Pup ISO's.

Could hybrid iso boot problems from installs made with balena and dd also be affected by hardware differences?

Might be, but have not found that case on any of my hardware.

Regardless, the OP has marked this topic as (solved)

Thanks
wizard

[grey38]

Thank you for replying.

>It seems that some of the recent pups have misconfigured iso files, that won't boot on a usb flash drive.
>I posted about it here:
>viewtopic.php?p=130634#p130634

Oh. Well. That sucks. I guess maybe that's why jammy and noble and bookworm all stopped booting for me.

>Why not bootup EasyOS, that has easydd builtin?

Because...I didn't think about it. I didn't think just booting a .ISO from a thumbdrive would be this much of an issue, it never was before. I didn't think to download a whole other OS to a thumbdrive and boot from that so I can use it to write another OS to another thumbdrive. Typing that out now seems convoluted when I used to just be able to use a normal .ISO writing tool and it worked fine.

Do you happen to know how many versions back Bookwormpup32 stopped working? Maybe I can figure out which of the older ones was the last one that worked so I can continue with my task.