USB and Floppy Booting
 

I finally managed to install GrafPuppy on a usb flash drive and a HD partition without incidents or errors. Problem is, not one of them will boot.....(expletives deleted..!) As far as the usb flash drive is concerned, I think it might be because the usb card was an add on and does not recognize the drive as a valid boot media (zip in the selection). As far as the floppy goes, I cannot get it to boot whatsoever which is strange because if I remember correctly, these machines (AMD Athlon in my case) instinctively try to boot from a floppy if it is left in the drive.
As usual, I would appreciate your input.
Michel

well lets confirm what your bios settings are first?

change your bios boot order to floppy then usb then cd then hd

when you boot if you see floppy light on but inserted floppy does not start reading but jumps to usb or hd etc then you know you have a failed floppy.

if after testing floppy and usb inserted jumps to normal hd then you know the usb failed to look like a bootable device.

(2) of course if you have no option in your bios to boot to usb then consider a bios flash upgrade....but pls take time to read all of the warnings.

Re boot
 

Thanks for the reply. As I remember (the pc is at home) there is only a Zip option for the boot process in ''other'' in the bios
I will revise the boot order in the bios as you suggested and repost the good or bad news. As far as the bios flash upgrade, I will look it up.

update
 

Well thanks to your advice I can now boot from the floppy.For the flash drive booting, the only option I have is Zip and that s what I get...So I will read up on the Bios flashing procedure before I turn the pc into a huge paperweight.I did however follow the procedures to install the grub bootloader on a partition.But I will definitly need to read up on your tutorial to figure this out. When I reboot, I get a prompt with options (a start..lol).
This is what I get
Linux (on/dev/hda1)
Windows (on/dev/hda3) (strange because I only have Kubuntu)
Linux initrd/tmp/boot/initrd.img-2.6.15.25.386 (on/dev/hda1)
Install grub to floppy disk (on/dev/hda0)
Install grub to linux partition (on/dev/hda1)

Now selecting... Install grub to linux partition (on/dev/hda1)...
will go through the whole process and report success.
Then when I select any other boot options I get an error 15...file not found.Do I have to move some startup files manually..
As I indicated I will go back and read your tutorial on grub and try to figure it out.
Thanks for the help

post your /etc/fstab output pls

I do not think kindly of a distro that is reporting install to floppy=/dev/hd anything

yes plse do some reading

be as verbose as you like.

(2) bios flashing is an option....I chose a dual bios gigabyte motherboard in case I ooped but I have done over 6 upgrades no problemo.....just read the readme and do not get impatient if you hear the floppy drive slow down.

I always have a clean format floppy....use kfloppy if you have KDE....the speed of the overwrite tells me how crappy my floppy is....fast is good slow or hangs is bad

btw......you do realise that grub needs to be on a floppy or cdr or MBR to read the rest of the booting files UNLESS you keep your existing bootloader in Mbr and chainload to the partition.

that may be it eh?

Thanks again
 

Output....
tmpfs / ext2 defaults 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts gid=2,mode=620 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,user,rw 0 0
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,user,ro 0 0

Do you mean there is no way to boot Puppy from the partition..
PLS suggest a good starter book as most of this is over my head.

Michel