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

[grey38]

@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

That's weird. I didn't mark it as solved. I just logged in because I tried banging my head against this again and nothing worked and saw that it said (solved) on my thread. I didn't do that.

[grey38]

I have now tried using the following command to write the .ISO to the thumbdrive.

sudo dd if=./BookwormPup32-23.12-240919.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

It still just seems boots for a bit then gets stuck on a black screen forever. Same result as with Mints GUI writing tool.

[Clarity]

I've posted results of @peebee's recent 64bit distro builds via WoofCE.Seen here

Interesting that BKWP64 and S1564 boot in all 3 environments under KVM, but VP64 dies at desktop console with no available desktop. Further, VP64 goes to desktop via being launched from SG2D and session is saved without issues. Rebooting via Ventoy with appropriate PSAVE & PMEDIA parms for the existing 'save' fails even though it works as expected via SG2D. This is both new and odd as this kind of issue has only happened once in 5 years of testing WoofCE PUPs. (I dont remember which one in the past exhibited this phenom, but was corrected in a future release, back then.)

FYI

[wizard]

@grey38

DD and Balena Etcher are bad choices for almost all Pups. Unetbootin and Rufus have been tested and working. If you have another workng Pup you can of course use Stickpup.

wizard

[stevie pup]

I've just ran a bit of a test, and made 3 USB sticks with Unetbootin, one with Bookworm32, one with NoblePup32, and one with JammyPup32. All 3 booted without any issues. The other thing with Unetbootin is that it's no problem to create the Save file on the same USB stick. When booted for a second time they all recognised their Save files, so no problems there either.

As a bit of a comparison I also tried the same 3 Puppies on my Ventoy USB stick. Jammy booted ok but neither Bookworm nor Noble did. I think the error message said it couldn't find main sfs file, or something like that. As I don't actually need a 32 bit Pup myself there was a limit as to how much time I was going to spend, so didn't investigate the Ventoy issues with Noble and Bookworm any further.

Hope this is of some use to somebody.

[tosim]

@stevie pup With what OS are you using uNetBootIn, please?

[stevie pup]

@stevie pup With what OS are you using uNetBootIn, please?

@tosim I'm using Unetbootin on MX Linux. I've been meaning to try it out with a Puppy, but haven't got round to it yet.

[tosim]

@stevie pup Thank you.

[bigpup]

I have now tried using the following command to write the .ISO to the thumbdrive.

sudo dd if=./BookwormPup32-23.12-240919.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M

It still just seems boots for a bit then gets stuck on a black screen forever. Same result as with Mints GUI writing tool.

This could be a graphics driver issue, that older computer may or may not have.

Do you boot to a boot menu with selections to choose for how to boot?

when you boot does it give you a boot menu to select an entry to use?
If yes.
There is an edit you can make to the entry, to get past the black screen.

I am going to assume Grub is the boot loader being used.

When the boot menu pops up.

select an entry, BUT DO NOT CLICK ON IT.

Press the e key to enter edit mode for the entry.

You want to add this to the end of the linux line of the entry. Could be the kernel line if a different boot loader is used.
At the end of the line have a space and then the added command.

depending on computers graphics hardware.

i915.modeset=0
radeon.modeset=0
nouveau.modeset=0

NB:
i915 is for intel
radeon is for radeon
nouveau is for nvidia

If this works you can edit the boot menu config file entry to permanently have this edit.

Note:
The grub edit screen, (along the bottom) will tell you what keys to press to continue booting, after you do the edit.