Installing puppy on a computer with a broken hard drive
 

I am trying to install puppy linux on a computer, which has a broken hard-drive. A HDD self test returned 07 Fail; I have no idea what that means but guess it means the hard-drive is borken.

I am told on the Puppy linux website that the OS can be booted without a working had-drive. However, when I try to install it (from a CD) it starts looking for Puppy files in my hard-drive. There are none, so it shouldn't need to look, and of course it fails because the hard-drive is broken.

So, is there any way to stop the installation trying to look for something on the hard-drive? I already tried pfix=ram (run from ram only).

Just now I ran it with boot-options pfix=ram (run from ram only) and loglevel=7 (higher bootup verbiosity) and got a repeating text of text with inportant-looking messages beign "Failed command:Read DMA" "error: {UNC}" and "EH complete" (last line). After ~5 mins it seems to get forward with displaying some done commands and then the computer just shuts down.

PS. I have no extensive experience with programming or linux (even though I have used linux for a while), so you have to tell me what to do from the basics but I should be able to do it after that.

Thanks in advance

@ Reply
 

Hi there,

Welcome to LQ!!!

Could you please let us know HDD is from which manufacturer? I would like you to have a look at the following link in which the guy was facing the same issue what you are facing and he then ran a diagnostic utility that fixed the HDD issue: http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Noteboo...e/td-p/1047245

As far as puppy linux installation is concerned could you please let us know which version you are trying to install. Here is the link which explains how to install puppy linux 4.3: http://www.mygnulinux.com/?p=385

You might want to also post ram specs on broken computer as Puppy loads into ram off of cd.

If you're certain that the HDD has failed, you can try simply opening the box and disconnecting it physically. Puppy will try to probe any potential storage device for it's persistent storage system by default.

I forgot to tell this last time: I'm running/installing Lucid Puppy 5.2.

Thanks for all the information. I actually got it to work with adding the pmedia=cd boot-option. For some reason it showed me the exact same repeating messages, then went onwards with the startup, without shutting the computer down. Does any more computer-minded person have any idea why the startup repeats the same process multiple times and then just go forwards? It doesn't seem to make sense, since nothing (I think) has changed.

Anyway, I'm actually typing this from Puppy, on another computer; I got it to work with the cd ,but the computer seems to be incapable of booting from an USB drive. However, that's not a problem; I'll just install it onto a cd on another computer and I should get it to work.

I'm not sure if I should start a new thread for this, but I have some traffic on this thread so maybe I'll get answers :). Is it possible to change the color of panels? Right now they are white, which looks horrible with my wallpaper. Also, for some reason, the volume of the system is really low :( I have the volume of the external speakers turned to maximum, and have checked the system volume (the one on the bottom right) is on maximum.

Thanks again for the swift responses :D

you have to decide what type install, save file(ultra easy), frugal or full, you need some media for persistence, a usb mem stick works or you can opt to use a rewritable cd with pup on it

Best I can do for showing you a downloadable pdf manual for using Puppy.


http://puppylinux.org/main/Manual-English.htm

The low volume problem might get cured by going to Menu - Multimedia - Alsamixer and then using the arrow keys to raise the PCM column.

...+1