Puppy loading... or not...
 

I have disks of Lucid Puppy 5.11 and MacPup 5.11. Both disks run very well on my laptop, an old 2001 model Sony Vaio which is already booting Ubuntu 10.04 UNE.

But neither finishes loading on my HP Pavilion a1020n desktop, which is running Windoze XP Home. They both bog down on looking for optical drives... interesting as I am loading them from CD and it reads the optical drives fine up to that point.

It's sad that a quick-loading portable Linux won't load at all on my newer, faster machine.

Maybe it's because the laptop has GRUB already? My HP chokes every time I try to modify the boot sector, lots of "wonderful" security features to keep Windoze from "getting corrupted".

And maybe it isn't. Any ideas?

Hello,

it maybe that you Linux is really not able to recognize the optical drive due to a missing module. You know, the information about the bootdevice comes from the bios and the bootloader on your install-CD recognizes it. But if Linux itself lacks the module it will not recognize the optical drive.

I'd recommend to boot with a more fullfeatured live-CD like Ubuntu and if this boots, check which modules there are loaded. And don't forget to execute and save the output anywhere.

Markus

It can recognize the optical drive enough to run the disk to install it... how can it lose the drive halfway through the process?

I can't run lspci until it finishes installing... can I?

I've tried more full-featured versions on this PC. I do have a live disk of Ubuntu... actually, one of each of the 3 latest versions... haven't tried running it as live, only as installation. I'll go check that.

I used a Karmic disk. It loaded to the point of asking me what I wanted to do, I selected "Try Ubuntu without making changes to your computer". It then did a couple things, went to the black screen with the Ubuntu "Circle of Hands" logo pulsing... the drive light started just doing a slow blink, almost in sync with the pulsing of the logo... 5 minutes later, nothing else had happened. When I pulled the CD, THEN it informed me that it couldn't find an active disk. Sigh.

Can you find out more information about your optical drive? Do you have a manual for the hardware of the computer?

Markus

The optical drives on my computer are those which are standard on an HP Pavilion a1020n -- one is a DVD+/-RW, the other a CD-ROM. I was loading the disk from the DVD drive. Belarc Advisor reports them as being HP DVD Writer 640c and ASUS CD-S480/A5. This model was first released in April 2005.

Suggest try using best CD-ROM media you have and place it in the CD-ROM drive. Next would be using UNetbootin and a USB Flash Drive (change boot order in BIOS first).

Should neither of these work, it is most likely a HP/Windows problem! Don't buy another one should you wish to run Linux, IMHO.

type puppy pfix=ram then enter for some reason if it fails this tels me you have a ram issue not enough. the other reason why they boot so good on the other machine there is a swap partition puppy will use that and it gives it room to work. live disk boot then load into ram if there is a swap partition then it will mount it and use it. so the real question is how much ram do you have.
this is company specsthat should boot puppy but if only running 256 then good luck. Not with out a swap partition.you may have a ram issue if xp is running real slow then go into bios and see if your ram is being seen.

DrakeO: Not the issue. And as I've said before, how do I run things like pfix=ram when I don't get the OS loaded? I've got 2.5 Gb RAM in this machine. XP does not run slow at all, it performs quite nicely. I also know of people who have loaded Ubuntu totally to this machine. It does not dual-boot well, but it single-boots just fine with either OS. That's why I was trying Puppy (LuPu and MacPup on separate CDs) on a CD...

hilyard, I'll try it using the CD-ROM drive instead of the DVD+/-RW drive, even though the DVD drive is E: and the CD drive is F:.

Hi, I'd suggest to install unetbootin on Windows and create an USB-installer of the distribution you want to install http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Markus

when puppy starts type ---> puppy pfix=ram <---- or hit f2 and look at options.

K. I'll try that. BTW, I have a cellphone shot of my screen... don't have a data cable to send it to my computer, and won't pay for mobile email, but if you want to see it, give me a cellphone number and I'll send it to you. Freezes at the same point each time, which is nice, I like consistency... have almost half the screen filled with text, and the last line reads:

Recognising media devices... optical

Have you tried a different release of puppy? I have 4.2.1 and haven't found a computer yet it fails to boot on. Some have hardware that isn't supported like sound and wireless, but they do run.

To various of you: I've tried the CD drive, with the same result. I have a jumpdrive, but don't have an available USB slot -- other than unpowered ones, which won't boot. I tried the jumpdrive on my old laptop, which does run Puppy from a disc, and it turns out that old 2001 Sony laptops won't boot from USB... or I need to set something in Setup, which I do not have the password to get into.

Thanks for all your help. One day I will have Ubuntu installed on that HP, or have a new computer (that hopefully will dual boot -- the HP won't). Can't mark this SOLVED, as it wasn't, but no need to continue on this thread. Thank you all.

If you need to get into the bios (setup) and don't have the password, it may help to remove the bios-battery for a short moment of time. Also maybe there is a jumper which you may remove and set.

You may look for a manual of you motherboard/bios in the internet.

Markus