How do you deploy Puppy to a USB-Key when you only have one Key and an operating system whose applications only create READ-ONLY USB-Keys?
This should have been obvious. But I kept stumbling over the idea that the procedure involved 'cutting off' the branch on which I sat.
Many Linux applications and the most often used Windows programs do a bad job deploying Puppys to a USB-Key. They create READ-ONLY, iso9660, drives. Although the Puppy so deployed may boot, it is impossible to create a SaveFile or SaveFolder in order to preserve customizations, settings, new applications; and/or to locate SFSes, portables or Applmages on the USB-Key.
To overcome this limitation my recommendation has been to obtain a 2nd USB-Key and, booting into the 'limited' Puppy on the 1st USB-Key use it and the tools available to it to create a fully usable Puppy on the 2nd Key. The persistence of a new Puppy member who only had one Key to work with shook me out of my comfort zone.
Two Keys are safer. But it can be one with one Key. On initial boot-up Puppy's entire operating system and all applications that were built-in are in RAM and the Key it booted from is Unmounted. If you wanted to, you could unplug the Key and still use your Puppy and all its applications. That means you can use Menu>System>gparted to reformat the Key, creating two (or more) partitions: an initial small, 1st, formatted Fat32 to hold the boot system, and a 2nd Linux partition to hold one or more Puppys. After closing gparted, I mounted the 2nd partition and created folder(s) to hold my choice of Puppys.
What I then did was Left-Click (mount) the ISO of a Puppy I had stored on the computer's hard-drive, copy its required system into the above created folder. Detailed recipe here, https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewto ... 1788#p1788. Depending on the size of the USB-Key, you're not restricted to only deploying one Puppy. Grub2config was used to create the USB-Key's boot-manager. It will create a grub.cfg file that will present on boot-up Stanzas for all Puppys, Windows and almost all Linux Oses found on the computer.
Alternatively, frugalpup-installer (or on non-UEFI-computers grub4dos) could have been used.