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CD for Puppy Linux isn't bootable

February 14th, 2012 - 02:29 pm ET by Ted Shoemaker | Report spam
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Hello,

As many of you can tell by the subject line, I'm inexperienced.
Please explain things in simple terms.

I'm trying to get a laptop to work. A friend gave it to me. It had
Windows XP + virus and won't fully start. So, I thought to replace
Windows with Linux: preferably, a simple version. I tried Ubuntu, but
it hung, probably because a 5-year-old laptop won't handle Ubuntu.
So, I tried Puppy Linux, which is supposed to play nice with older
hardware (even as far back as a 386).

The instructions for Puppy Linux are to download a 130 MB file, save
it to CD, and boot the laptop with the CD. But when I copied the file
onto CD (using Windows), it ended up not being bootable. At least the
laptop doesn't think it's bootable.

Can somebody please tell me, in simple terms, how to make better
progress?

Thank you!

Ted Shoemaker
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#1 J G Miller
February 14th, 2012 - 02:58 pm ET | Report spam
On Tuesday, February 14th, 2012, at 11:29:44h -0800, Ted Shoemaker wrote:

The instructions for Puppy Linux are to download a 130 MB file, save it
to CD, and boot the laptop with the CD. But when I copied the file onto
CD (using Windows), it ended up not being bootable.



From your description of *copying* the file on to CD, it sounds to
me that you created a data CD with the file copied on to that
CD, so that when you do a directory listing of that CD, you see
a single file something like blah_blah.iso or maybe with an
extension .img.

This will never boot and is not the way to create a bootable CD
with the GNU/Linux file system on the CD.

When you use your CD burning tool you must not select "create data CD"
but you must use the option "burn {ISO} image"

This will then mount the ISO image and copy the individual files
contained within the ISO image to the CD including the necessary
boot data to the CD.

When you have finished burning the CD instead of just seeing
blah_blah.iso on the directory listing for the CD, but various
files including probably linuxrc (the booting configuration file)
and various directories /bin, /boot, /usr etc etc.

Hope this helps.

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