Bionicpup32 - installing to SSD [solved]
(WORK IN PROGRESS)
Similar to my last post about problems installing Bionic64 to ssd.
I have Bionic32 installed to usb and am trying to frugal install to an internal blank SSD
The first time the installer only added the sfs files to the ssd, no actual linux files. I copied these across from the usb key and manually edited pmedia=ataflash
At boot it gave the error "Operating system not found"
Gparted on bionic32 did not give the option available on bionic64 to add a "legacy boot" flag. Also the installer did not add the esp flag which is done automatically on bionic64's installer and may be needed[?].
Running the installer gave error messages - the terminal brought up by the installer program doesn't support copy and paste via ctrl+shift+C or right click menu and no alternative hotkey is explained (this should be considered a bug 
) and the ctrl+c shortcut closes the window which is non-standard behaviour and prevents the user sharing their error on forum (bug )
It was something like "cannot stat"... vmlinuz and another important file
Where bionic64's installer recognizes "many puppy installs" and somehow adds the missing files to make a working install, bionic32's installer recognizes "many puppy installs" and deletes everything on the disk except extlinux.conf (this is a bug as the installer is installing nothing)
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minor point - the usb key includes a script fix-usb.sh which seems to be fatdog specific (might be a bug )
# This small script will fix the "missing space" caused by dd-ing fatdog isohybrid to a flash drive
# making the rest of the space available again for use.
# Only run this after dd-ing fatdog iso and not after anything else.
# (C) jamesbond 2013, Jake SFR 2018
has this been copied in error from another distro?
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When creating the first time pupsave the user is prompted for the encryption password before the save name ( usernames should be first, then passwords)
If they are entered the wrong way round, the user needs to abort the process as otherwise they will have their username as their encryption password. If "No" is selected at the final 'sanity check' stage, the system shuts down without creating a save (this should be considered a bug - the desired behaviour would be to let the user re-enter the correct details for their pupsave. All of this seems like a relic from the days of live-cds, which are themselves a stupid relic of people wondering if they wanted to keep Windows.
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09:46 - from forum posts like https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=67877 I now think this may be caused by puppy writing a non-working mbr.bin onto the boot sector of the disk. I remember the option to overwrite the mbr came with the text "personally this mbr.bin worked for me"... which isn't really good enough. It must personally work for the user and if there is some "art" to create a working master boot record this should be walked through.
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When creating the usb from bionicpup32-8.0+26-uefi.iso from sourceforge, it does not put a copy of the .iso onto the usb.
When the installer is run from the usb it requires a copy of the iso. I am not sure if the -UEFI tag in the name is desirable for a PC that probably does not have UEFI. If there is an other version of this iso that doesn't have UEFI perhaps I want that instead.
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Grub4DosConfig v.1.9.3 displays device sizes in kB when the sizes shown are clearly in Gb
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what seems to have happened is that when the Installer has to call Gparted to format the ssd, it forgets (or can forget) to next call Grub4DosConfig
I am 90% sure this is a bug and not that I chose a wrong option.
When the Universal Installer is used and next "Install to internal flash drive" (the last option of the 4) it didn't call Grub4DosConfig so the reason it errored "No Operating System Found" was that I did not have any bootloader.
On Bionicpup64 I found that "Install to internal flash drive" was required to install puppy to a SSD
On Bionicpup32 the reverse is true, this time I selcted "Install to SATA IDE drive" and it called Grub4DosConfig. ("Oh, yes, why wasn't it doing that before?")
From the 20-30 puppy installs I have done, I feel it would be better to separate GParted from the Installer and just tell people that Puppy should be installed to a drive you have preformatted (and Puppy supports the following... )
Lastly I am not sure if this is a bug or a vagary of 32-bit but GParted didn't seem to support formatting as ext4 and said that something with a name like ExtLinux[?] needed to be version 4 to do this. I did not worry about that and just went with ext3.
So all done. Total time to install to a blank USB key and a blank SSD card (before starting to install any software) was about 5 hours.