Hello Yancek,

Thanks for your reply.

I'm not sure about the rest of your last post. Are you able to actually boot Puppy on the hard drive? No, I get an invalid boot sector error message Seems not from your previous post. Are you using a CD/DVD with Puppy? Yes, I have WaryPuppy 5.5 iso You should be able to delete and/or format any partition. I agree, I should be able to... If you are trying to unmount a partition which you are booted to, you would expect the "busy" message. I'm not able to unmount the drive, even during the initial stage of the boot process. The OS made me create a PW to allow the drive to be mounted, but even if I skip the PW, quit to console and try to unmount, no luck. It's this way even if I choose to boot from DVD.

Do you still have windows on one of the partitions? Not to my knowledge. I was initially able to delete all the existing partitions and format them to .3fs, but I think there must be some remnant, maybe on a hidden partition. The 40GB drive had only 37.2GB available even with all the visible partitions deleted, and before I formatted the drive...

Reading back over your earlier posts, you indicate that you have tried several Linux versions unsuccessfully as well as DBAN. Do you have a CD drive or a DVD drive or both? Are you burning to a CD? It is possible but very unlikely that they could all be bad downloads or bad burns. It is also possible that your CD or DVD drive could be bad or that there are loose connections on the cable. Have you checked all these?

And you have burned that iso file to a blank CD and selected the option to 'burn as an image', correct? Then booted the computer with the CD in the drive?

The installation of the Grub bootloader obviousl failed. The last time I installed Puppy which was several years ago, there were 7 steps just to install Grub. I don't know if they've changed that?

I'm not sure what you are trying to mount or why. You can't boot the installed Puppy so you are using the CD with Puppy and want to try to mount the partition on which you tried to install Puppy to view files?

When you installed Puppy, you should have been prompted upon reboot to save a pup_save.sfs file. Did you do that?

Hello Yancek,

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

Reading back over your earlier posts, you indicate that you have tried several Linux versions unsuccessfully as well as DBAN. Do you have a CD drive or a DVD drive or both? The drive on the old laptop (the one I'm trying to put Linux on) is DVD-ROM. I'm burning to DVD+RW discs with a desktop about a month old, using a DVD-RW drive. The desktop is running Windows 7, and I've used the native Windows image-burning software as well as downloading EasyISO and burning with that. I haven't tried burning all the discs twice, because honestly I don't think that's the problem. Are you burning to a CD? It is possible but very unlikely that they could all be bad downloads or bad burns. It is also possible that your CD or DVD drive could be bad or that there are loose connections on the cable. Have you checked all these? I haven't opened my desktop to see if the SATA cable is loose, but I know it's not damaged as they were also new and I put the tower together myself. I've built a number of desktops and I'm pretty conscientious about checking connections after I route the cables. The drive itself has performed flawlessly in other respects, and I have a Windows 7 laptop with better hardware that I checked some (not all) of the ISO discs, they booted to a stable Linux environment from the disc.

Quote:
Yes, I have WaryPuppy 5.5 iso
And you have burned that iso file to a blank CD and selected the option to 'burn as an image', correct? Then booted the computer with the CD in the drive? Correct, except I'm out of CDs so I'm wasting space on DVDs. Used Burn Image. Tried to boot the old laptop form all the CDs and only the Puppy made it to desktop and actually allowed me to delete the Windows and system partitions and reformat.

The installation of the Grub bootloader obviousl failed. The last time I installed Puppy which was several years ago, there were 7 steps just to install Grub. I don't know if they've changed that? Nah, it's still a nightmare of numerous options, none of which work, the dialogue box just loops back to the main choices over and over again.

I'm not sure what you are trying to mount or why. You can't boot the installed Puppy so you are using the CD with Puppy and want to try to mount the partition on which you tried to install Puppy to view files? No, actually, I'm trying to find a way to unmount the hard drive so I can then delete the current Puppy partition and try another fresh install.

When you installed Puppy, you should have been prompted upon reboot to save a pup_save.sfs file. Did you do that? Yes, and further it forced me to create a PW to allow the drive to mount during boot. But, even if I forego the PW and use the command prompt to unmount the drive during boot, I still get the message that it's busy. Also, the other lightweight Linux distros I've tried to boot from CD, for instance Legacy OS Mini (Puppy) won't boot to desktop successfully, and the ones that aren't based on Puppy are still not recognized as bootable media. Basically, not knowing a lot about Linux I seem to have painted myself into a corner.

If the partition on the hard drive is mounted, it should show as an icon on the Desktop if I remember correctly. You should be able to find where it is mounted if it mounts on boot by just opening a terminal and typing mount. Sample partition output from my machine:

In the example above, the partition is sda9 and the mount point is /mnt/data, so to unmount that I would type: umount /mnt/data

Modify that as it pertains to your system and see if you get any positive result. If you see an icon for a hard drive partition when you boot Puppy from the DVD, have you tried right-clicking to see if there is an unmount option? Also, if that partition is mounted, can you access it to see if you have the appropriate files, especially /boot/grub/ and the menu.lst file which should be in it. If the Grub install is just looping back when you try to install then I doubt there is anything there.

Have you only the one partition, sda1 on that drive?
You should actually be able to boot Puppy and reinstall to the same partition with the DVD and format the partition in the process. No need to delete it first. Unless that causes problems for some reason.

If the problem is in installing Grub and it repeatedly looping and never installing, I have some notes which worked for me and should work installing Puppy as the only OS. Let me know and I can post that.

If the partition on the hard drive is mounted, it should show as an icon on the Desktop if I remember correctly. You should be able to find where it is mounted if it mounts on boot by just opening a terminal and typing mount. Sample partition output from my machine:

Quote:
/dev/sda9 on /mnt/data type ext4 (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,commit=0,user)
In the example above, the partition is sda9 and the mount point is /mnt/data, so to unmount that I would type: umount /mnt/data

Modify that as it pertains to your system and see if you get any positive result. Unfortunately, no. Device or resource is busy. If you see an icon for a hard drive partition when you boot Puppy from the DVD, have you tried right-clicking to see if there is an unmount option? There is but it is greyed out. Also, if that partition is mounted, can you access it to see if you have the appropriate files, especially /boot/grub/ and the menu.lst file which should be in it. There are a number of files containing the words "boot" and "grub", but I can't find that set of directories. The menu.lst file also did not exist at first. The OS popped up a Window with a few lines of text defining the drive and partition and told me to find menu.lst and add the text in. Since the file didn't exist I just took the relevant text out of the popup window and saved it as menu.lst in the appropriate folder. If the Grub install is just looping back when you try to install then I doubt there is anything there.

Have you only the one partition, sda1 on that drive? Yes, as it turns out that was probably one major mistake.
You should actually be able to boot Puppy and reinstall to the same partition with the DVD and format the partition in the process. No need to delete it first. Unless that causes problems for some reason. I've tried using the Install function on the desktop, and though it will take me through the process, the drive is still mounted and the partition cannot be deleted/moved/resized nor the drive formatted

If the problem is in installing Grub and it repeatedly looping and never installing, I have some notes which worked for me and should work installing Puppy as the only OS. Let me know and I can post that. It's worth a try if you don't mind, and thanks again.

When I booted the Puppy CD to install, there were two icons on the Desktop labelled sda1 and sda3. If you see this (sda1) you could try to open it. I'm surprised the umount option is greyed out as Puppy runs as root (administrator) all the time. No idea what that is about.

That, as I recall, would apply if you have another Linux operating system with a menu.lst file and the intention is for you to copy it to the menu.lst file of the other system.

No, I don't think so. Puppy and any Linux system can be placed on a single partition so I doubt that is the problem.

The information below is from notes that are several years old and I haven't used Puppy recently so if you don't see what I show below, then things have changed in Puppy. I would suggest taking notes in case something goes wrong you can review it later if something goes wrong.

I didn't use the Install icon on the Desktop. I don't know if it is the same as the method I used. What I did was to click on the Menu button in the lower left, mouse up to setup and then over to Puppy Universal Installer and click on it. You get a new window where you select the device on which to install. Internal (IDE or SATA) hard drive should be the correct choice in your case. You proceed making your selections in GParted Partition Manager and then proceed with the Install. You should get to an information page showing an option to Install Puppy to sda1. If everything is successful, you should get a window showing Puppy was successfully installed and you should see a tab at the bottom of the window: Install/update Grub. Click on it.

You should then get a new window with some information to read and at the bottom 2 options: Update and Install. Select Install. Another window opens indicating the grubconfig script will be run. Read it and click OK. Again, a new window to read with options Simple and Expert. Click on Simple to highlight it then click OK. The next window is the Frame Buffer window and just accept 'standard' the default and click OK. The following window will ask you where you want to put the Grub files. These would normally be put on the root filesystem partition. In your case, it should be sda1 and if sda1 is the only partition on the drive and is shown in the box on the page as highlighted, click OK. You will get yet another window to read and a box at the bottom in which you need to select the option "MBR install to master boot record". Since you have no other operating system and thus no bootloader, this is necessary or you will not be able to boot. Ignore the message "possibly unsafe" since you have no bootloader installed to make "unsafe". Click OK and after a short time, you should get a success message, click the OK button. You may then get a window with Yes/No option. Read it and click No and reboot. If it is not successful, repeat the process again carefully. If it still fails, I don't know what to say other than Good Luck!

Hello yancek and everyone else who replied to help,

First I'd like to thank everyone again for taking the time and effort to answer my questions.

Second, the system is now booting from hard drive and I'm looking forward to getting to know the OS better.

To resolve the issue I had with unmounting the hard drive was ridiculously easy. I deleted the warysave file that apparently told the OS that I was good to go and that it should lock down the hard drive. Once I did that, I was able to unmount the drive and delete the partition I made and create a new one for a fresh install.

Next, yancek, you were right, there was no boot manager installed, and even after I got the drive unmounted Grub would not work, at all. Grub4DOS, however, worked just fine and allowed me to install a boot manager to the partition.

But, I still couldn't get the computer to boot from hard drive, so I went to the PuppyLinux forum and read a very thorough guide for that "breed" of Linux here. It didn't coincide exactly with what I was doing but did help me get up and running pretty quickly.

The boot problem was caused by my failure to set the boot flag for the partition. Simple as that, but I didn't know enough to even ask the question.

So, again, thank you very much for your time and patience, and I hope I didn't waste anybody's time. If I did, it was not intentional.

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