Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

@rcrsn51

Did you boot off USB, which was the crux of the issue in this thread?

Yes, all boot test were from USB

wizard

Sorry. I meant Wiz57. Autofill picked the wrong wiz.

rcrsn51 wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2024 1:20 am

@Wiz57 Did you boot off USB, which was the crux of the issue in this thread?

Not this time as it seems the problems were with the USB drives themselves. Might dig out my old ScPup32 from 2019-2020 if I can find it...
I stumbled across an ancient Slax 5X USB the other day, lol!

Wiz57 wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2024 1:14 am

And to prove your old Acer Aspire One AOA150 still has life, I'm currently on MINE!

Zombie Computer, very fitting for Halloween.

@rcrsn51

Point of interest, was able to boot an old Compaq EVO n610c Pentium 4, 512kb ram laptop computer with BionicPup32-19.03-241006.iso USB flash. Did require using "mitigations=off" on the kernel line in grub menu.lst (or it would stall). Also, the n610c bios does not support USB boot so used PLOP to fix that.

wizard

Was that with "pmedia=cd" still turned on?

I'm starting to wonder how many of those "sfs file not found" episodes that people are always reporting are actually due to bad USB sticks.

It doesn't seem to me that the particular Unetbootin/Rufus/Ventoy app is to blame.

@rcrsn51

Was that with "pmedia=cd" still turned on?

Yes

wizard

rcrsn51 wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2024 5:53 pm

I'm starting to wonder how many of those "sfs file not found" episodes that people are always reporting are actually due to bad USB sticks.

It doesn't seem to me that the particular Unetbootin/Rufus/Ventoy app is to blame.

I was beginning to think along those lines, but now I think it's a combination of things. Let's say we create a USB stick, by whatever method, and it won't boot no matter what we do. That would suggest a dodgy USB stick. So we create another USB stick which we plug into a laptop and it boots fine, no issues. But then we plug it into a different laptop and it won't boot. That would make me think it's the hardware that's causing the problem.

But what if some boot ok in a particular laptop but some don't? Could this be down to the particular app used to create the USB stick, or indeed due to the quirks of Puppy, and the way it's constructed? I have had cases where something will boot from, for example, Unetbootin, but not from Ventoy.

I've never had any of these boot issues with any mainline Linux distro. If I happen to read about a mainline distro that I fancy giving a spin, normally I just download the iso, copy it to my Ventoy stick, and boot it up. And they always do boot up. Ok so there's been the odd one or two that hasn't behaved after installation, but they always boot up in live mode to try them out.

All this could just be one of life's great mysteries.

stevie pup wrote: Fri Oct 18, 2024 10:56 am

All this could just be one of life's great mysteries.

See my discussion here about booting off optical drives. The same idea applies to USB. Any flash drive can do Step 1 provided that the installer tool ran OK and the drive is healthy.

The problem is with Step 2. It depends on the health of the drive, how the SFS files are stored on the drive, whether they are visible to the bootloader, how the initrd goes looking for them, how well the BIOS maintains contact with the USB hardware, whether any intermediate steps like Ventoy are involved, etc. A lot of things can go wrong.

Fatdog avoids the Step 2 issue by putting all its stuff in a huge initrd file. But that can cause other problems.

The Porteus boot tools in Debian Dogs are very good at finding their Step 2 "from=" stuff.

ISObooter has separate PuppyOld and PuppyNew options to handle how different Puppy generations boot.