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

[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.