Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hi all,
Trying to make use of an old laptop (HP pavilion from 2014) I installed puppy linux on it (full install).
Something went wrong when installing "grub something" (I forgot the full name)
Then I did not find the menu.lst file so I did not copy the text into it as I was aksed.
Then I restarted the computer.
Now it always boot on a GRUB terminal, I don't manage to have another behavior. I thought I might restart the installation from scratch with the USB stick, but I don't manage to boot on the key. When turned on, the computer directly rushes to this grub prompt and I have no clue what to type there to have something happening. I have the feeling I finished killing this little coputer
Any help in this regard will be super appreciated, thanks in advance.

Hello and

To boot from USB you can try to press F12 while the BIOS boots the pc.
I don't know the exact key for HP. It may also be ESCAPE.
At least on some of my machines this brings up a BIOS BOOT OPTIONS menu to choose the bootdevice from.
An other approach would be DEL or F2 keys to access the BIOS and edit the bootdevice order...

HTH

Hi

1. I think you will save yourself a lot of problems if you do the first installation on a USB flash drive and choose BionicPup32-8.0 (UPupBB-19.03) .
2. In contrast to standard Linux installations, the standard installation in Puppy is FRUGAL.

First what specific Puppy version?
Yes, this is important to know!!!

What did you use to do the full install?

How did you install the boot loader?
You need to get booted from the Puppy Linux on the USB to fix this.

Basically you need to reinstall the boot loader correctly.

Usually there's key to press, to choose the boot media.
E.g. to boot from USB flash drive try F8, F11, F12 or any of the F-Keys.
It might give a menu to choose the boot device from.

Something went wrong when installing "grub something" (I forgot the full name)

Not knowing what tools you were using, I would recommend the instructions found

https://puppylinux.com/install.html

to create a bootable instance of puppy.

If you create a bootable usb with dd, then you will need a second usb to make the frugal install on if you are not making the frugal on the hp hard drive.
sometimes using a cd is easier to get a bootable instance running to work from, in order to make an install.

The generic HP boot menu keys are Esc and F9.
The key to access HP laptop boot menu on most models is Esc (HP Pavilion boot menu is no exception).
The universal HP BIOS keys are Esc, F10, and F1. The most used HP laptop BIOS key is Esc or F10.