You said earlier you could only boot Puppy by using the Puppy CD. I assumed you meant you could boot to the installation on the hard drive but if you are seeing read-only filesystem, you are probably just booting the CD and using it?

Any system on a Live CD will be read-only.

The commands I suggested previously assumed you were booting to the hard drive install. If you boot the CD, open a terminal and create a mount point: mkdir /mnt/sda2
then mount the filesystem: mount -t ext3 /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2
(I'm assuming Puppy is ext3 filesystem, can't remember, may have to change that)
then do: ls /mnt/sda2/boot
and: ls /mnt/sda2/boot/grub

See what the output is.
Did you do the full install to partition option?
You do not actually enter Sda2, can't use upper case letters.

If you get output from the above ls command, take a look in the /boot/grub directory at the menu.lst file and if you have one, post it here.

Many thanks, Yancek.
I've done what you suggested in your last post but used ext2 rather than ext3 because ext2 was what appeared when I looked at the partitions.
ls /mnt/sda2/boot produced: grub

ls /mnt/sda2/boot/grub produced:
device.map jfs_stage1_5 reiserfs_stage5 stage2_eltorito
e2fs_stage_5 menu.lst stage 1 usage.txt
fat_stage1_5 minix_stage1_5 stage2 xfs_stage1_5

ls /boot/grub/menu.lst produced:
No such file or directory

Hope I've copied it accurately.

Your output shows a menu.lst file in the /boot/grub/ directory. In order to view the contents of it, you can use the cat command. Since you are using a Live CD, if you have re-booted since issuing the commands in my last post, you will have to do them all again. If you have not re-booted, just do this: cat /mnt/sda2/boot/grub/menu.lst

That should allow you to see the contents of the menu.lst file. If you do not understand this, post contents here.

If you have re-booted the computer, run the command below before doing the cat command above;

You should see an entry for Puppy and for xp. Then just need to install to mbr and if you post it someone will be able to give you exact commands.

/boot/grub/menu.lst edits
 

I've been away from my computer for a few days - visitors.
I have now edited the menu.lst file to include the instructions given in the Puppy Linux Manual. The file entry for Linux now looks like this:
# Linux bootable partition config begins
title Puppy Linux (on /dev/sda1)
rootnonverify (hd0,1)
kernel /puppy501/vmlinuz pmedia=idehd psubdir=puppy501
initrd /puppy501/initrd.gz
# Linux bootable partition config ends

But I still get the error message:
Error 15: File not found

What file is it looking for? In my /mnt/home directory I have the following files/directories:
boot
lost+found
fsckme.err
lupu-501.sfs
lupusave-bill.2fs
pupswap.swp

Is the grub loader looking for one of these or for puppy501/vmlinuz, but can't find it?

But I now see that my /mnt/sda2 directory is empty. Is this the problem? Is this where the grub loader is expecting to find the files it is looking for?

Bill

rootnonverify (hd0,1) refers to /dev/sda2. To refer to /dev/sda1 you want rootnoverify (hd0,0)

Many thanks, RockDoctor. I'm afraid my previous post had a typo. The menu.lst does read: title Puppy Linux (on /dev/sda2) but I typed sda1 in the post by mistake. But the grub still doesn't work!

If the above is NOT a typo, change "rootnonverify" to "rootnoverify".

Not /mnt/home. Are you still getting this information using the LiveCD? You need to create the directory and mount each time you re-boot the LiveCD. If you use the commands I suggested previously and mount: /mnt/sda2, you should see the vmlinuz file in the puppy501 directory. That is what the kernel entry above is pointing to.

Many thanks for all your help here, particularly Yancek. But I have taken the easy way out and dumped Windows. Now I have a full install of Puppy 501 on my Sony Vaio PCG-FX109K with the boot and powerdown working nicely.

I have learned a lot from this experience and have overcome my anxieties about working with shells and command lines.
Many thanks again.
Best wishes
Bill