Creating Puppy Live USB with Rufus

[stevie pup]

I'm starting this as a new thread to separate it from the other thread on Live USB's, and if anyone thinks it's particularly useful and wants to pin it/move it/whatever they can do.

I've done some further tests and this is the outcome. I've burned a few Puppy ISO's to USB sticks using the latest version of Rufus (3.20) and these are the results:

Bionic 32 - Success, booted ok
Bionic 64 - Success, booted ok
DPup Stretch - Success, booted ok
Fossapup - Success, booted ok
Slacko - Success, booted eventually
Tahr - Success, booted ok
Vanilla Dpup - Success, booted eventually
Xenial - Success, booted ok

You will note I've said "eventually" for both Slacko and Vanilla. With both of these I initially got a message on screen which said "Waiting for Partition - Failed", followed by a load more stuff in red (which went straight over my head), then a line which said "Pausing for 60 secs". After leaving it, for considerably more than 60 secs, they both booted ok.

As these two had been less than perfect I tried them with both Ventoy and YUMI, and things got even more interesting. Vanilla booted ok with YUMI, but with Ventoy it couldn't find the SFS file. Slacko on the other hand booted ok with Ventoy but on YUMI just produced an error message "Failed to load COM32 file", whatever that means.

Few things I should perhaps mention. My own use of Puppy has only been with Bionic, Radky's Buster and Fossa, so I have no particular knowledge of the older ones. I've never had to burn an ISO to CD/DVD so don't know anything about that either. I also don't use any fancy, expensive, USB sticks. They're all common everyday Kingston, Transcend, etc.

For the purpose of these tests I've stuck with Mainline Puppies, but if anyone wants me to try a specific Puppy shout up and I'll give it a go. I retired last month so I've got some spare time nowadays.

Lastly, if you are trying to create a Live USB and are having a problem please remember to state exactly which Puppy it is, what Operating System you are using, and what software you are trying to burn it with. Without all that info we won't get anywhere.

Thanks

[Geek3579]

Thanks for starting this new discussion. I can confirm that RUFUS can be used for many of the OS you mention above. Its pretty foolproof and a really good way to get beginners into Puppy LInux (and other Linux OS), if one can boot the usb, which can be done from a running version of Windows (described below), once secure boot is turned off.

Open up the Windows icon and click on <Power> button to open power options.
Press and hold the Shift key and click on <Restart>.
The <Choose an option> menu should appear
Select the <Use a Device> menu, which will allow the computer to boot from a CD/DVD or USB
A new window will pop up with boot device options.
If a UEFI compliant device is present such as a CD/DVD/USB, it will come up on the menu.
Click on the device to run the OS.

From memory, RUFUS also asks you to add persistence, but I think that's only a FAT32 partition for saving private files, its not part of a full or frugal Puppy installation. You are still installing a LIVE OS.

[PuppyJJ]

Good post, brother

I'm currently settled with FossaPup via a frugal install to USB. Before that, I tried out FossaPup64 9.5, BionicPup64 8.0, XenialPup64 7.5, Slacko64 Puppy 7.0, and TahrPup 6.0.5 via VENTOY.

All of them worked fine for me with no noticeable delays in booting... except for TahrPup. Upon selecting TahrPup from the menu, it just went straight to an error message of some sort -- no further menus or boot related output.

I'm going to try Tahrpup again with Ventoy on another USB stick some time tomorrow evening to see if the same thing happens or whether it was a freak result.