Hello, all. I am in fact a Linux Newbie, but I have been researching this problem aggressively for 2 days now, so I think I'm okay bugging you all for help. I really like the Puppy distro, Chubby variant. (By the way, is there adistro-specific forums this should go in? I didn't see Puppy there.) I've run it off the LiveCD with no problems except the usual learning curve. My real interest was in installing it to my 256k Sandisk Cruzer Micro flash drive. The LiveCD included a utility expressly designed to create such a disk, and after tooling around and figuring out how to make sure my Flash drive was formatted correctly (fat) and mounted, I successfully ran that utility, which should have given me a bootable usb drive with Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc.

Trick is, I've tried booting this from three different computers, in each case making sure that the computer allowed USB boots, and that the BIOS was properly configured. Each of the three computers ignored my USB drive and went straight to Windows. I even checked to make sure the USB drive was not somehow listed after the hard disk in the boot priority list.

What gives? Any ideas? I could try another distribution, but flashpuppy looks just right, especially the chubby variety. And I like that it loads entirely into RAM; the speed is indeed impressive.

Please help. I not only want this for the really cool geek factor, but also because in another couple weeks I'll have a new, better job that, sadly, won't give me my own private computer, and to have a computer-on-a-keychain would be very nice indeed.

Unless someone out there wants to buy me the BlackDog Linux or the Ubuntu H2, I could really use the help. (While you're at it, buy me a minivan--I've got my third kid coming in less than a month.) I have searched the puppy-specific websites for quite some time now with no results. Thanks.

-Joel

You say you have formatted your drive as FAT: I don't think this will be suitable for booting or running linux as FAT will not deal with linux's file permissions, groups and users. You'll need to format it as ext3, or reiser, or whatever your preference is, unless "Puppy linux" (about which I know nothing) is doing something very clever.

Having said that, it does not seem to be being seen as "bootable", whether this is a filesystem format fault, or something else is difficult to say. Try reformatting the flash drive with a linux filesystem for a start, then ask puppy to make a bootable version of itseelf on the flash drive, and see what happens. You'll need to set your BIOS to boot from the flash drive before the HDD, but I think you know about this already.

Hope this helps, & welcome to LQ!

I'll give that a shot. Thanks for your help.