So I am installing Puppy on an old Compaq M300 laptop, which has no CD or floppy.

So I took out the hard drive, put it into a USB enclosure and installed Puppy from my desktop.

When I put the HD back into the laptop, it wont boot. Puppy offers to create a boot floppy, but I cant use that option. Is there a way to set the hard drive to boot itself?

(I am newbie to Linux so bear with me)

Would it make a difference if I unplugged my desktop HD, which would make the USB/laptop HD to be an "a" partition?

Please post your thread in only one forum. Posting a single thread in the most relevant forum will make it easier for members to help you and will keep the discussion in one place. This thread is being closed because it is a duplicate.

Could you please close the other one instead?

I dont think its a distro issue, and this place will get more traffic.

thanks

What boot manager have you installed on the drive? Lilo or grub? You need a boot manager on the drive.

When you did the install was this the only drive connected to the controller or was a secondary? This affects how the boot process is configured in /etc/fstab.

Unplugging your desktop hd and setting the bios boot to USB and installing the boot manager would be the safest way.

To make the drive bootable, there must be boot code (eg GRUB) in the MBR. I am familiar only with GRUB. When GRUB gets installed to the MBR, it is "hard-coded" to point to the /boot directory where it will find its stage files, config file, etc.


If you install GRUB using the shell, the commands are:

grub...............starts the GRUB shell
root (hdX,Y).......tells GRUB the partition where it will find /boot
setup (hdZ)........installs GRUB in the MBR of disk Z

These parameters need to be as they will appear when the disk is put in the new machine. For example, suppose that Linux (/boot) is on the first partition of the drive, and there is only one drive in the new (target) system. The commands would be:

grub
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)