Installing Puppy from a hard disk
 

I have been having an impossible time trying to get Puppy to install from a CD...!

Not any CD - it does THAT well as you know - but the optical drive as fitted to my new Foxconn P9657AA SATA motherboard. This mobo needs to use the JMicron IDE controller which halts a range of recent (2.6.18) Linux installs after the boot is underway. It suddenly fails saying it can't see the boot CD. Foxconn support is glacially slow (9 days wait for 'support') and Jmicron useless. Be careful, folks...

Anyway. My next attempt has been to install from the distro CD files as written onto a DOS drive C: (FAT32 primary partition) and use the existing GRUB menu to kick it off as in:
root (hd0,0)
kernel (hd0,0)/vmlinuz
etc.
It fails, not finding a/the vmlinuz file.

Tried it with a flash-pen and all I got on the screen was:
Loading FreeDOS
ROOT FAT KERNEL GO!

... and there it sat.

There's probably a better way that someone has used in the past with a SATA mobo... could you tell me what it is, please? The answer is probably v. obvious but I don't mind being embarrassed!

Ta,

Have you tried using some of the PMEDIA commands ... not sure where the complete list lives but some of the ones I have found are:
PMEDIA=satahd
PMEDIA=satacd
PMEDIA=usbcdrom
PMEDIA=usbcd
PMEDIA=idecd
PMEDIA=idehd

Your plan to copy to the hard-drive sounds like the way to go but you just need to tweak your grub command. This is what mine looks like. Yes I have a bunch of partitions for testing new releases :) Just the first pizzapup one is all that you need i guess!

default=0
timeout=10

title PIZZAPUP
root (hd0,4)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 nopcmcia
initrd /initrd.gz

title GRAFPUP
root (hd0,5)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 nopcmcia pfix=ram
initrd /initrd.gz

title Slax 5.1.8.1
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz max_loop=255 init=linuxrc changes=slaxsave.dat load_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=4444 root=/dev/ram0 copy2ram nopcmcia acpi=off rw vga=773 autoexec=startx
initrd=/boot/initrd.gz

title Slax 6 pre 10
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz max_loop=255 init=linuxrc load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=4444 root=/dev/ram0 copy2ram nopcmcia acpi=off rw vga=773
initrd=/boot/initrd.gz

title linux2
root (hd0,7)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz vga=769 changes=slaxsave.dat max_loop=255 init=linuxrc load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=4444 root=/dev/ram0 rw
initrd=boot/initrd.gz

label slax3
kernel boot/vmlinuz append vga=769 changes=slaxsave.dat max_loop=255 initrd=boot/initrd.gz init=linuxrc load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=4444
root=/dev/ram0 rw

label linux4
kernel boot/vmlinuz append vga=769 changes=slaxsave.dat max_loop=255 initrd=boot/initrd.gz init=linuxrc load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=4444
root=/dev/ram0 rw

title MUPPY 007
root (hd0,6)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 nopcmcia pfix=ram
initrd /initrd.gz

title Puppy214
root (hd0,7)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 nopcmcia PDEV1=hda8
initrd /initrd.gz

Hi,

I don't have sata drives and so my solutions might not be apropos. I used a straight DOS install to a small partition on my ide drive. I copied the necesary files to the drive using a serial port connection (no network card or CD drive available). Then I used loadlin (a dos program) to start Puppy and after Puppy was running I used its tools to Install it to the hard drive including the grub installation. After I restarted the computer and Puppy was running natively from the hard drive I wiped out the DOS partition and reclaimed the space for use by my Puppy Linux system. Like jumping into a hole and pulling the hole in after you.

If you can't get your system running with the help of others who DO have sata drives I will dig out the details to do it the way I did. I have subscribed to the thread so I'll be following your progress.

Bill