Hi, I am new to this forum and it is my first post. I came here googling to find a solution to my rather mysterious problem.

I have a samsung n150 netbook with win xp home in it. a couple of days before i prepared a bootable pendrive with lupu 5.01 using Universal USB Installer. I face the same problem -- When i boot into Lucid Puppy for the first time using the pendrive, the system reboots just before it says loading drivers.. after the first reboot the system works fine. You can shutdown the system and start over again any number of times provided, you are booting into lupu every time.

Now, if i decide to boot into xp, i remove the pendrive and switch on the netbook. The same thing happens. the book reboots just before the progress bar below the winxp logo shows. after that reboot, the system boots fine and you can have any number of reboots provided that you are booting into XP all the time.

Why i think this is not grub specific is because, there is no grub in my hdd as it contains only one os. and i have never tried to load linux in it. I prepared the lupu live pendrive in another system.

I sifted through the BIOS, but couldnt find a suspicious setting.

Can anyone figure out the culprit?

Bios boot order is set to boot off of USB first in boot order. That is the Culprit.

You have grub installed on the pendrive. Right?

Otherwise. Grub would show on screen when booting up with pendrive pulled.

Bios IS controlling how your netbook boots.

Also the reboot sounds like each operating system. Puppy and Windows. Is doing a File check, hence the reboot.

Is the internal drive a solid state drive (SSD)?

Hi rokytnji,

Thanks for the reply.
Yes, you are right, my BIOS boot order is set to boot off USB first.
Otherwise, how could i boot to Puppy from pendrive?
The bootloader is in the pendrive.

The same pendrive works fine in another system.

When the windows is rebooting the second time, it shows that windows did not finish loading in the previous attempt.. and it shows the options to start in safe mode, et al.

That makes me think that the reboot is hardware-initiated and not done by the OS.

The internal drive is a normal 160 GB SATA.

While I use Windows 2000 Pro for certain tasks like motorcycle tuning software. I never use that Windows laptop on the internet when I can help it. One thing I do is defrag and compress the heck out of Windows since it likes to scatter files all over the partition. I also use CCleaner also to get rid of cruft also.

Any hows. On my Asus EEE 900. If I leave a Flash Drive (Puppeee) physically in the Netbook. And Boot off the internal drive (AntiX 8.5). And mount the Puppeee flash drive in Antix. Or vise versa and boot into Puppeee and Mount AntiX in Puppeee. I get a file check on either drive on next boot because fdisk reports drive was not unmounted cleanly and will do a file check, Which after it checks partition. It goes into a reboot.

The work around solution for me is to make sure I unmount the drive before shutdown. Or. Just remove the flash drive physically before booting up internal drive.

Mine though is a 4/16 gig SSD drive. Ext2 partitions on internal, and external flash drives.
No swap either as I don't do swap on Solid State Drives.

This might be of interest to you also. I will be making a pendrive of it also to test on a Acer Aspire one ZG5 Netbook.
I consider it one of the more Stable Puppy Distros for Netbooks and Jemimah is a top notch developer IMO.

Hi rokytnji,

Thank you very much for introducing me to a lot of software. cccleaner, puppeee, antix. I will download another flavor of linux and test with it whether the problem persists or not.

But i think this is a bios issue specific to netbooks. I am not sure, though. Why i think like this is because, the same pendrive boots without any issue in another system (desktop). I am thinking of contacting Samsung support.