@fixedfury505
Your return to the Puppy forum is very welcome. You are in the process of installing Puppy Linux (Slack Puppy) and had some trouble. Well, I decided to write a note about the first steps. You may know everything I write here - in that case - skip it. I thoroughly recommend the link your see (further down this posting). It's a reference to a note from Rockedge, where he describes using gParted. His work assumes a background that doesn't come from using Windows; Windows is a 'hand-holding' OS. You get C: You get a disk with the OS. You don't format the HDD. In this respect Windows is great - until something goes wrong. Then you're in a barb-wire canoe, up a difficult creek without a paddle. When you are familiar with 'the Puppy' you'll find yourself in a solid canoe where lots of people will hand you a good paddle. Hang in there; we'll get Puppy installed and running.
Now here is my intro to formatting.
Formatting - an introduction.
When the first rotating drives were pioneered by IBM in 1957, the surface of the disk platter was unmagnetised; in that state it could not store any data from the computer/mainframe. Today, at first, the much smaller mechanical drives are similarly unmagnetised. Before a drive can be used, then, the surface must magnetised in some way. The manufacturer "writes" a series of magnetic concentric rings (the tracks) and subdivsions within each track (the sectors) onto the disk surface. By analogy, this process is somewhat akin to moving empty shelves in a new library. Space is available to put books; but at this stage there is no catalog showing where various "books" (i.e. files) are found. This process is called "low level" formatting.
The second stage of formatting a drive - "high level" formatting - is to determing some logical arrangement of storing information to each track and sector, creating some form of catalog (i.e. a directory) giving the location of where each file can be found the disk platter. The Microsoft operating system adopts the office/document/file analogy by substituting the word "folder" for the Unix/Linux "directory". The directory, then is nothing more than a catalog of the location of each file on the disk (or by extension thumb-drive or FDD).
Many different "high level" formats (file systems) are used to arrange the information on a storage device. Abbreviations such as FAT32 (a system using a file allocation table), NTFS (a 'new technology' filing system), ext2, ext3, ext4 (extension to earlier filing systems) hint at the underlying structure for the format used on some particular storage device.
Our interest is the filing system used to install Puppy Linux to a hard drive.
Various pieces of software can write one of the high level formats to the drive. The command line can be used for this:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
"mkfs" will "make" (i.e. write) a file system to a storage device. The file format will be "file extension #3" for a drive known (to the system) as storage device b1.
Using the command line is tedious; in Puppy Linux the graphical partition editor "gPartEd" is more convenient. This note will come to that shortly; first we must deal with "partition". In our example from IBM and 1957 the surface of a disk platter was a single entity. As disk capacity increased a process - partitioning - sub-divided the storage space of the disk platter into smaller, apparently independent segments or partitions. Thus sda may be partitioned as sda1, sda2 ... and so on. A table - the partition table - records the beginning and ending location of each partition on the drive. In our analogy of libraries, this would be locating several libraries in one building with a guide at the entrance indicating: Library #1, to level 4. Library #2 at levels 5 .. 8 and so on.
Here I re-introduce gPartEd, the partition editor.
This is shown in the forum topic below:
https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 184&t=5241
In that forum posting @rockedge assumes you will install the Puppy Operating System to a legacy internal drive, but you can easily extend his instructions to formatting a thumb drive (or a Solid-State Drive).
Well, Rockedge's instructions are quite detailed; you can easily follow them. My only comment is this: he begins the process by deleting a partition.
I begin the process by Device -> Create a partition table.
I have no idea whether deleting a table blanks the partition table, whereas creating a partition table certain initializes the info in the table for sure. You can ask Rock about that. He knows much more about this than I do.
This is a long posting; the second of two.
I'll write the first now.
