Note: This page is outdated. Now you can use the universal installer (located under start-setup-Puppy Universal Installer)

U S B

See Also:
SpeedupUSB
USBKeysTroubleBooting (formerly TroubleBootingUSBKeys)
USBNotWorking
UsbSpeedTip
USBWorking


'Q: USB storage for my personal data'

I am booting Puppy from the live-CD, but I don't want Puppy to keep the personal data "pup001" file on the hard drive. I would like this file to be on a USB pen drive. Can I do this?

'A:' For Puppy version 0.9.7, we are partly there. If your PC has only a NTFS partition, with no pre-existing "pup001" file (see NTFS question above), then Puppy will ask if you want to use a USB drive. You may then plugin a USB drive and the file pup001 will be created on it. So, the hard drive won't be used at all.

If you want to make this the default behaviour when the live-CD boots, then you will have to remaster the CD. Puppy has a script, in the Start -> Setup menu, that takes you through this, in easy steps. At one point in the remaster script you will get the opportunity to edit the file "isolinux.cfg", which is the CD boot configuration file, and if you add these parameters: "PSLEEP=25 PHOME=sda1" then Puppy will use the USB drive as the "home", ie, the location of your personal pup001 file.

Another alternative is that you can install Puppy totally onto a USB Flash drive. Again, in Start -> Setup you will find a script to do that. If your PC has 256M of RAM, a good choice is a 128M Flash drive as Puppy will automatically load the entire Flash drive into ramdisk, totally eliminating writes to the Flash drive during a session (thus greatly increasing the lifespan of the Flash drive). see also FlashDetail

One reason for not installing Puppy totally into a Flash drive is that some PCs cannot boot from USB -- look in your PCs BIOS setup to find out if this is supported. Some major BIOSes need "legacy USB support" set true to actually boot, even with USB in "F11 boot media menu" already enabled. Still you can use flash-puppy then and use an additional boot-only media like CD or floppy-disk, allowing for an "everything on stick system" for practical matters.

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CategoryHardware