@geo_c What Vanilla Dpup version did you try to boot - is it 9.2.17? If not, maybe you should try it, because it includes the fix for boot from some USB hard drives.
Can you share the output of dmesg
and lsmod
from a Puppy that boots successfully so I can see what drivers are used? I can add missing drivers if needed.
(And 10.x is in early development, I wouldn't recommend it)