Can Puppy be installed to External Hard Drive? (Solved)

[stevie pup]

I've tried Bionic32 and Fossa so far. If I can get it sorted I would prefer to use Bionic32, for the simple reason the original point of having it on an external drive was to have something universal. If I use Fossa then being 64 bit only it won't be universal. So going forward I intend to concentrate my efforts on Bionic.

Hopefully I'll make some progress over the weekend.

[greengeek]

If I go down this route what size should I make this first partition? I'm guessing it doesn't need to be very big?

True, it doesn't need to be very big. But i habitually make it about 8GB when i set up this sort of portable drive. That way it gives me a partition i can use to store any large video file that i may want to transfer onto a Windows machine. Windows cant see any EXT3 partition so it is handy to have a good sized fat32 space for swapping files between different operating systems.

[wizard]

@stevie pup

Have a Dell 6430 laptop. Here's what worked for me.
-set all bios settings for legacy
-booted Friendly Bionic32 from USB viewtopic.php?t=5188
-attach 320gb USB sata hdd
-gparted format ext3 & set boot flag
-use Frugalpup to install Puppy files to USB hdd
-use Grub2 bootloader config to install grub to USB hdd
-reboot, press F12 for boot menu
-select USB hdd

Boots into Bionic32.

If your laptop has both USB2 & 3 ports, try booting from both to see if it makes a difference.

wizard

[wizard]

@stevie pup
Could not find that you have listed the make and model of your computer, but think that would help.

Did some testing on laptops available to me:

External sata hdd, ext3, boot flag set.
Dell e6430 = ok
Dell d630 = ok
Dell Vostro 3750 = no, drive did not show in boot menu
Thinkpad T41 = no, drive did not show in boot menu

w/Added empty fat32 partition to end of USB hdd.
Dell Vostro 3750 = ok
HP g60 = no, boots to blinking cursor, no grub menu
Thinkpad T41 = no, drive did not show in boot menu

Also tried a HP dv9500, but it would not boot at all with the USB hdd connected, suggesting a power issue.

All of these laptops will boot from a USB flash.

This suggest that it is related to the computer's bios ability to recognize the USB hdd as a bootable device.

wizard

[mikewalsh]

@wizard :-

Ah. A-ha. Yes. A light is beginning to dawn.....and the grey matter is beginning to stir.

Related (kind of) to my post about the USB 3.0 boot issues I had on the old Compaq, shortly after that - I would guess within the following 12-month period - I started getting issues even trying to boot from USB flash drives.

Older flash drives from a few years previous still booted fine. But any new purchases would flat-out refuse to boot, claiming that there was nothing there TO boot from.

A bit of research revealed I wasn't the only one with this problem. It turns out that most manufacturers of flash drives were switching over to a new generation of controller chips.....which were set-up to see USB flash drives as USB HDDs instead. But to get these seen as a flash drive, the general recommendation was to update the BIOS. The older BIOS was incapable of interacting correctly with the modern controller chip's "interpretation" of what was attached to the system.

At that point in time, the final BIOS update for the Compaq's mobo was already 12 years in the past. So for then, I soldiered on with my older flash drives, which fortunately proved to be pretty reliable & long-lasting.

Mike.

[wizard]

@mikewalsh

Yeah, with the older hardware there's no standard for how the bios recognizes USB's, it's "iffy". Sometimes you can reset a USB flash's "removable bit" so it is seen as either a flash or a hdd. Lexar has a MS Windows utility called Bootit that would do it. Sometimes you could add the utility "Plop" to the internal hdd grub menu and it would work. I have a couple of old P4 and AMD single core laptops that the bios doesn't support USB boot and PLop works on them.

It's the price of progress and lack of standards.

Thanks
wizard

[stevie pup]

This is just a quick update as I'm a little pushed for time at the moment. The first thing I did at the weekend was to look through my collection of USB sticks to see what other distro's I'd still got. Found one with Manjaro on it, so plugged that in and booted it up. Installed it to same external drive, shut down and unplugged everything. Plugged just the drive back in, pressed the button and voila, Manjaro booted up straight away, no problems whatsoever.

Now to me this proves that a) there's nothing wrong with the drive, and b) there is nothing wrong with the BIOS or BIOS settings. I have also installed Bionic to an internal drive, and that worked without issue as well, so I like to think I'm capable of making the right settings in Grub4Dos. For interest the two laptops I usually use for my experiments are a Dell 1545 and an Acer 5735, both from 2009. All USB ports are USB 2.0 and all my drives are USB 2.0.

The only other time I've had an issue like this was last year with Antix. Booted up fine from USB and booted fine when installed, but couldn't get it to boot from external HD. Thing with this was that I didn't even get an error message, just a flashing cursor in top left of screen, so there wasn't much to go on.

All other distro's I've installed to an external HD, and there's been a few, it's been without problems. Fingers crossed further update tomorrow.

[greengeek]

Can you use Gparted to have a look at the hdd partition format now that Manjaro is on it? Is it still ext3 or has the Manjaro install routine made any changes?

[stevie pup]

Can you use Gparted to have a look at the hdd partition format now that Manjaro is on it? Is it still ext3 or has the Manjaro install routine made any changes?

Sorry but I had already wiped it before I read your message, but from memory I believe it formats it EXT4, and I think most Linux distros do but could be wrong on that point. Besides, when I installed Bionic to an internal drive I formatted it EXT3, and there weren't any problems. Now on to my update.

So, back to the beginning. I boot Bionic32 from the USB stick then plug in the external HD, and almost instantly the icon appears on the screen, SDD1. I can open the drive to look at what’s on it, and I can copy and paste items to Bionic, and also from Bionic back to the HD, without issue. Then I go into Gparted, where I can format it, make new partitions, set flags, do whatever I want. I’m not going to get the drives mixed up as in addition to the SDD label the external drive is a completely different size to the internal drive and the USB stick.

I think at this point we can all agree the drive has most definitely been recognised by Bionic. I then format the drive EXT3 and set the boot flag. Then I go to menu – setup – Puppy installer, and on next screen I click on Universal installer. On the next screen I click on the second box down, USB hard drive, and promptly get an error message which says “Nothing to choose. If a plugin device, did you plug it in?”

Back to plan b. Created new directory on the drive, and copied all contents of ISO file into it. Then ran Grub4Dos, again ensuring I picked correct drive. Shut down, unplugged everything, plugged the external drive back in, and pressed the button. Same result as before, no Grub screen, just an error message that says “Missing Operating System”.

On to plan c. Created small partition at start of drive and formatted Fat32, then formatted rest of drive EXT3. Again created directory with contents of ISO file. Ran Grub4Dos again, then shut down. Attempted to boot it back up, but this time got an error message saying “This is not a bootable device”!

I am now at a complete loss as to what is going wrong. Anyway, I’ve spent far more time on this than I originally intended, so for the time being at least I will continue to use my YUMI set up. Which took all of 10 minutes, and is also on an external HD, not a USB stick, but has never failed to boot anything.

On a final note, I can’t help thinking this sort of thing is likely to scare some people away, such as someone that has just come from Windows and is new to Linux generally. Expecting them to start messing around with Gparted and such like just to install to an internal drive, I think some of them would run a mile.

[greengeek]

Your frustration is understandable. The message "is not a bootable device" does offer scope for further investigation.

Are you willing to troubleshoot further?

There are many hardware/software interactions that affect booting.

You are getting closer to a solution - if you don't mind checking a couple more things?

[rockedge]

I have tales of strangeness when it comes to external HDD's attached to a variety of machines and operating systems.

How again is this HDD being connected? I have and am using various SATA/IDE adapter types to connect salvaged HDD's from dead desktops to my machines.

This method is pretty reliable but not always. Then there are the NAS type USB drives.......adventure abounds with these things. And of course the many different USB flash drives can all act differently. Some are seen by the systems very easly and others never seem to really work right.

Is this external HDD talked about in this topic have a FAT32 partition of any size on it anywhere?

I have entire machines operating that have dead internal drives and only use USB SATA adaptors and salvaged drives from old 2000's era machines. I have hundreds of HDD from the dumpster/roadside junk machines. Surprised on how long some drives hang on.

I have had drives that were not seen at all after many many tries and lots of tactics used....and suddenly...usually never a known reason why.....suddenly spring to life. These suddenly spool up in speed and I can feel the drive spinning and pop! there it is on the desktop......another ghost in the machine.

[rockedge]

The way I have most luck with external HDD's is first a small 1 G FAT32 partition that has the boot flag enabled and next to that the ext3/4 parition

All of the boot loaders like Grub4Dos or Grub2config will be on the FAT32 with the menu.lst boot stanza's pointing to the Puppy Linux distro on the ext3/4 partition.

Troublesome USB connected external HDD seem to work mostly this way. I have a My-Book NAS drive that holds a half terabyte of Puppy's and Dog stuff. It can't seem to be recgonized when the boot flag is set on it. But connected, no boot flag on any partition in it and the boot system on the internal drive can use it very nicely with LABEL or UUID

[stevie pup]

How again is this HDD being connected?

All my external drives are self contained accessory items, non of them are rescued from PC’s, so they’re just connected by USB cable.

Your frustration is understandable. The message "is not a bootable device" does offer scope for further investigation.

Are you willing to troubleshoot further?

There are many hardware/software interactions that affect booting.

You are getting closer to a solution - if you don't mind checking a couple more things?

Yes it is frustrating. I haven’t actually kept count, but for arguments sake say you have a dozen distros that you’re trying to do the same thing with, same equipment, methods, etc. 10 of them work perfectly but 2 don’t, you can’t help wondering what the hell is the matter with those 2.

I’m giving it a rest for remainder of this week, but may have another look at it next weekend, so if you want to make any further suggestions feel free, and thank you.

At one point I was going to say that Manjaro, Linux Mint, and all the rest, don’t have a magical ingredient, but in a way perhaps they do. You boot them up from USB stick, click on the “install” icon on the desktop, and away you go, just follow whatever comes up on screen.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a Windows machine that just has a single NTFS partition. Formatting it, setting boot flags and everything else is all automated. Unfortunately Puppy doesn’t have that “luxury”.

[wizard]

@rockedge

These suddenly spool up in speed and I can feel the drive spinning and pop! there it is on the desktop......another ghost in the machine.

Have had many old drives "fail on the shelf". This is usually due to one of three things:
1. the grease in the spindle bearings is old and gets stiff, when the drive gets warm it can loosen and spins up.
2. the read/write head arm bearings, same thing.
3. a read/write head(s) have stuck to the platters. (This one not very common on modern drives that autopark the heads)

wizard

[bigpup]

If it is trying to boot the external hard drive and it is not getting to showing a boot loader menu.

You are doing something wrong when you use Grub4dos Config to install the boot loader.

Are you doing this?

First screen choose to install it on the external hard drive.

Select to search only within this device.

Leave all other options unchecked.

Everything else should be OK as default settings.

When asked about writing to the MBR, let it do that.

Keep selecting OK until done.

There is something you are not telling us, but we only know what you do tell us.

You say you are taking all the files from within the Bionicpup ISO and placing them into a directory on the drive partition.
That should work as basically a manual frugal install.
Best if you name this directory bionicpup.
For sure Grub4dos knows that is a Puppy Linux install.

Please post an image of what the Rox file manager shows is in that directory?
That way we know for sure you did that correctly.

Forget about doing installs using the Universal Installer.
It is in bad need of updating.

[BarryK]

@stevie pup ,
I have just scanned through this thread.

If you just want to install to the external drive and bootup, in one easy operation, do this:

Download easy-4.2.2-amd64.img from here:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64 ... 022/4.2.2/

Check the md5sum:

Code: Select all

# md5sum easy-4.2.2-amd64.img

...which should be: 4117eaaac576962e4962c2aad0199ae8

Plugin your external drive and write to it. Let's say it is /dev/sdc. Make sure that you write to the entire drive, not a partition:

Code: Select all

# dd if=easy-4.2.2-amd64.img of=/dev/sdc bs=1M
# sync

That's it, all done. Just choose the drive in the BIOS-Setup or UEFI-Setup.

The EasyOS image has the Limine bootloader builtin, in a 7MiB fat12 partition, and the second partition is where Easy is installed -- that is ext4, it is 816MiB and will automatically expand the fill the drive.

The Limine bootloader works on legacy-BIOS and UEFI computers.

There really is nothing else to do, you are up and running immediately.

For keeping your personal files, see /files, which is a link to /mnt/sdc/easyos/files, and most apps will default to open and save here.

Note: the easy-4.2.2-amd64.img has a msdos partition table (mbr) so can only handle drives up to 2TB.

EDIT:
Have just now rewritten this page:

https://easyos.org/install/how-to-insta ... w-ssd.html

...applies to any drives, internal or external.

[stevie pup]

You are doing something wrong when you use Grub4dos Config to install the boot loader.

Screenshots attached, hopefully.

I've had another go, done everything exactly the same as I did previously, and it still won't boot. But for some mysterious reason this time I've got a different error message, which reads:

error file '/boot/grub/i386-pc/normal.mod' not found

Which means nothing to me. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable can explain and perhaps point me in the right direction for putting it right.

If you just want to install to the external drive and bootup, in one easy operation, do this:

Thank you Barry, if necessary I'll come back to this in a few days.

[bigpup]

I've had another go, done everything exactly the same as I did previously

But did you do this when using the Grub4dos Config to install Grub4dos boot loader?:
First screen choose to install it on the external hard drive.

Select to search only within this device.

Leave all other options unchecked.

Everything else should be OK as default settings.

When asked about writing to the MBR, let it do that.

Keep selecting OK until done.

On that image of what is on the drive.
If all it has is one partition sdc1
Seems you have the operating system in that bionicpup directory.

But do you see any of the boot loader files just on sdc1 outside of that directory?

The Grub4dos files you should see on sdc1
.

Screenshot(6).jpg (16.22 KiB) Viewed 813 times

.
.

[greengeek]

Are you able to post screenshots of what Gparted shows for sda, sdb and sdc please?

No need to take any actions - just tell Gparted to look at a drive , take a screenshot then close Gparted. Then repeat for each drive.

[stevie pup]

Well, success at last, it boots! When I checked what was on the drive the sdc-mbr.-bak file was missing, no idea why as I hadn't told it do anything different. So I deleted the other stuff then ran Grub4Dos again. Checked and everything was there, then booted it up successfully.

So following on from this I decided to install to a different external HD. Again this was successful, but not until the fourth attempt. The previous three all failed, for some inexplicable reason. Throughout this saga I have at no point ever done anything differently in Grub4Dos, I've always done the same thing as shown in the screenshots I posted previously.

So to me a lot of it remains a bit of a mystery, and I can only think of two possible causes. Firstly, that Grub4Dos is a quirky, temperamental thing that does what it wants when it wants? Probably not impossible but equally not likely. The other option is that my external drives are nearing the end of their lifespans, and they have become quirky, temperamental things that do what they want when they want. The fact that I've never had any similar difficulties installing to an internal drive would suggest this as a most likely cause.

Thank you to everyone for the many contributions to this thread, much appreciated. I'm going to mark it as solved, but if anyone ever asks how it was solved I'm going to have a hell of a job trying to explain.

[bigpup]

Grub4dos Config is usually rock solid 100%.

There is always a chance of downloading from the internet, software did not get 100% perfect download.

That sdc-mbr.-bak file gets created when some of the Grub4dos stuff gets installed on the drives MBR.
That file is a backup copy of what was originally on the MBR.
If for some reason you wanted to roll back to the original MBR.
This sdc-mbr.-bak file could be used to do that.
So, if that file is not there.
The step to choose to install to the MBR never got done.

I keep asking if you exactly do specific stuff when running Grub4dos Config.
All you tell me is you run it.

[stevie pup]

I keep asking if you exactly do specific stuff when running Grub4dos Config.
All you tell me is you run it.

Not sure what you mean by "specific stuff". When I say I just run it I mean I simply open it, click the details as shown in the screenshots in my previous post, and click ok, ok, etc. I don't do anything else.

[bigpup]

I specifically wanted to know if you did this:

When asked about writing to the MBR, let it do that.

You got it working.

Forget me trying to figure out what your actual problem was.

I am happy you finally got it working.

Computers and computer software seem to do this to us sometimes.
Trying to do something and it just seems to not be working.
Then it suddenly just works