I'm running Bionic Puppy 8.0 on my USB flash drive right now. I love the OS, and want to install it onto my laptop's hard drive, but apparently GRUB and Grub4Dos won't recognize any partition I make specifically for it as bootable, despite me making a point to flag that partition as "boot" in Gparted. I will admit, I'm pretty new to the whole Linux scene, only getting really into it when I bought this laptop. I'm very thankful for the "Pupsave" feature, since I don't have a Windoze backup and currently have only one USB drive to boot off of. I'm paid in two days, so that'll be fixed, but I would love to just install Puppy and have it as my daily driver anyway.

If you need any specs, I have a Lenovo Ideapad 330-15ARR with an AMD Ryzen 3 processor and integrated AMD Radeon Vega graphics. With 8 gigs of RAM and a 1TB HHD, it's pretty beastly for little ol' Puppy, but I love the distro too much to really care, haha!! Any help would be much appreciated, as I'm sure I just need to learn how to partition the drive properly! Thank you in advance!!!

How exactly (every step in detail) are you making a partition "for it"?

I wiped my HHD, making a new GPT partition table and adding a 500 MiB partition (formatted to Fat16) for either Grub4DOS or Grub Legacy. I used the rest of the disk for installing Puppy, using an ext4 filesystem. I used different tools, first with Gparted, then with Cfdisk, though I only know how to flag partitions in Gparted, which is how I flagged the 500MiB one as "boot." When that didn't work, I used the flags "bios_grub," and "legacy_boot." Any combination of those flags that I could use in Gparted, I tried.

You mention a 'windows backup' but give no indication of whether you currently have some version of windows installed or what version/release it might be. If you do have windows installed, particularly windows 10, have you shrunk the windows partition so that you will have unallocated space on which to install Puppy. Also, turned off fastboot and hibernation in windows.

@ WinterFrost201:-

Welcome to LQ.org, and the 'Puppy' sub-forum in particular.

I agree with yancek. We do need details of just how you've created this partition. If you have Windows on there, shrinking the Windows partition will be best achieved with Windows' own disk-tools, since in the process everything will be double-checked to make certain Windows will still run correctly afterwards.

Once you've correctly created a partition for it, transferring a 'working' Puppy from one location to another is a simple case of copy & paste. It really is that easy.

Back to you....


Mike.

I did say I completely wiped my hard drive. I have 999.45 GB to download Puppy on. I've enabled legacy boot, making it the default to boot to in the BIOS. Also:
I apologize for not making that clearer...

I posted this earlier:

Still not enough details on exactly what you did, e.g. which Grub4DOS and Grub versions did you use?

Try starting over without using EXT4, XFS or BTRFS, e.g. using EXT2 or EXT3 instead of EXT4. You may have been thwarted by unsupported EXT4 features, e.g. 64bit, maybe others. You might be able to use EXT4 if you format using the "-O '^64bit'" option, depending on the Grub* versions used.

Some efi bios won't allow to boot internal GPT hardrive in legacy mode. Internal harddrive has to be msdos to boot in legacy mode. If windows is installed in efi mode it is best to install puppy in efi mode and use grub2 as bootloader. You said that you wiped the drive, if so and there is no windows, format drive as msdos, boot usb puppy in legacy mode, install grub to mbr should allow to boot drive in legacy mode