Bionic fails to boot from USB stick in HP G6 (Solved)

[Barrowman]

Hi, I decided to give Puppy a look at today.
Downloaded bionic uefi 32 bit. used dd to get it on a USB stick.
Tried booting on my HP G6- 16Gig Ram.
Got to boot menu and picked the first option but it hangs at an underscore character and no further response.
Only way out was pressing and holding the Power button.
Any idea what is wrong?
I've posted in the xenial forum because the xenial uefi 64 bit hangs at a line drawing of a pup with a bit of decoration.

[Phoenix]

dd doesn't always work, and if you intend to make a savefile on the USB it won't work. Could you try using Rufus from Windows, or Etcher for Linux?

[rockedge]

Hello and to the kennels.....

Why are you going with the 32 bit Bionic? I haven't booted Bionic32 in a while from USB but it sounds like you have a copy on a USB drive that is close to booting cleanly.

The first boot menu selection you used? Is this a Windows OS machine?

There are some other methods to make a bootable USB.

[wizard]

Try one of the tested methods listed here viewtopic.php?t=5192
and it should work. If you install using Rufus you'll also be able put a save file on the USB. If you install using Rosa, you'll have to use Puppy to remake a USB that can store a save file, see here viewtopic.php?t=5313

wizard

[williwaw]

G6 tower or laptop? burning to cd might be the easiest to get the tools you need if you have the hardware and do not have any bootable puppy in service. Once you get a puppy booted you will have more install tools to pick from

[Barrowman]

Sorry but it looks like this won't work. I run Linux Mint 20 on 3 different laptops. All fairly new and without DVD drives. I don't have an external one hence would like to boot from USB stick.
I have tried dd, USB image writer and discs. No good with any of them. I tried the xenial 64 bit uefi and that was no good. This was true of both bionic an xenial on the Dell and the HP laptops.
I didn't try either on my Lenovo machine but it doesn't look good.
I have no desire to download a tar file and compile it to use Rosa as it seems just as likely it will be a waste of time.
There is something wrong. I have used 2 different USB sticks one of which previously had Mint 20 on it and was the one I used to install Mint on all 3 machines.
If there are any other suggestions I would be willing to try. I don't give up easily. I started with Slackware in the mid 90's and if you don't know that was all about editing text files and a lot of compiling.

[wizard]

@Barrowman

The link to Rosa will get you a tar.xz file that you just unpack and run, no compiling required. As a test, try one on the recommended distro in the topic referenced above.

wizard

[williwaw]

@Barrowman
dd will work with an image that includes the partition table
Easy Os is packaged this way for cloning to a dedicated drive or USB.

http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/ ... s/dunfell/

Code: Select all

# gunzip --stdout easy-0.9.12-amd64.img.gz | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=1M
# sync

GUI tools found in most linux distros are generally for use with hybrid isos, and are used for creating a single install on a dedicated drive. It's a common packaging with other distros, but most pups or dogs are not packaged as hybrid isos.

A persistent Bionic install needs some disk partitioning, copying of files from the iso and a bootloader.

If you find a way to boot a Bionic iso9660, (ie. live, not persistent) the GUI tools you find will walk you thru the steps above using gparted and grub etc.

many experienced forum members install multiple pups alongside each other (in a single partition or on different partitions on the same drive) and create their frugal installs manually once they have a drive partitioned with a boot manager installed. they may not want to use "install" tools as they may be adding pups to existing installs

a manual install on a drive already in service (with the desired partitioning and bootloader), involves nothing more than clicking on (mounting or opening) a new iso, creating a new directory and copying some files, and then adding an entry to the existing bootloader conf.

[wiak]

Hi, I decided to give Puppy a look at today.
Downloaded bionic uefi 32 bit. used dd to get it on a USB stick.
Tried booting on my HP G6- 16Gig Ram.
Got to boot menu and picked the first option but it hangs at an underscore character and no further response.
Only way out was pressing and holding the Power button.
Any idea what is wrong?
I've posted in the xenial forum because the xenial uefi 64 bit hangs at a line drawing of a pup with a bit of decoration.

Hmmm... I've just completed installing Zorin OS (Ubuntu also works) onto an HP Probook 430 G8 laptop (dual-booting with the pre-installed Windows 10 Pro). I also have KLV-Airedale (from this forum) booting on it, but only from a usb stick. However... the latter of these was not easy... By default no chance to boot alternative distro from usb stick because of various UEFI Secure Boot characteristics of this machine; even turning OFF 'Secure Boot' alone didn't seem to be sufficient to get this to work (but I can't remember so worth trying that if you can - but if you are using Win 11 Pro then that needs Secure Boot ON, and Win 10 Pro happens to also need Secure Boot ON on my G8 laptop if, as pre-installed, BitLocker encryption is enabled in Windows). Of course your G3 may not have such complicated and rigid Secure Boot (including TPM firmware and more) requirements.

So to get KLV-Airedale to boot from usb, I needed to have it on a usb stick that had a grub2 on it that included a UEFI/BIOS puppy.cer on it, which on first boot the laptop asks me if I want to install via MOK utility, to which I answered yes and browsed for puppy.cer and let that burn into the UEFI-related firmware; after that I could successfully boot KLV-Airedale from usb stick (but not if I put the KLV-Airedale frugal install files onto the internal hard drive - that flipping wouldn't work - I guess HP has that firmware protected too and puppy.cer not sufficient for that one in the boot chain security checking - KLV can't mount the internal hard drive on boot...).

How did I prepare such a puppy.cer usb stick for using with KLV-Airedale? Well, actually, on other machine I booted up Fossapup distro and it includes program frugalpup installed (I think that's what it is called, but can't check right now), which allows creation of a UEFI capable usbstick for booting fossapup (you need to read the frugalpup help on how to use it - basically two steps: 1. Install the fosspup files to usb and 2. Install the Boot loader, which does the grub2 and puppy.cer part for you). Forum member 'shinobar' I notice provides something similar lately called Grub2boot or somesuch (you'd need to search the forum for it). I then tried booting with the now usb-stick installed Fossapup and it was then my laptop said needed Mok certificate and I let it burn the puppy.cer into the related UEFI firmware; fossapup then started booting but crashed. However, clearly the grub2 itself was managing, so I copied in a KLV-Airedale frugal directory and edited grub.cfg on the usb stick to boot that, and that worked......... So not difficult, but not easy either...

However, maybe your machine isn't SO SECURE like this stupid HP ProBook 430 G8 machine, though I have heard that some HP laptops are crazy like my one and very difficult to install Linux on. Ubuntu and larger distros like full install Fedora and Debian (and Zorin as it happens) seem to really understand UEFI boot with Secure Boot change even in full-on complex security configurations - so I was able to install either official Ubuntu or Zorin onto hard drive physical partition and dual boot with Windows 10 Pro with full Secure Boot active, but not thus far any of our forum distros (so far only that usb stick with KLV Airedale success for forum distros, not yet any Puppy - BionicPup a bit old, so I think you need to first use Fossapup to create that special usb stick and then 'maybe' BionicPup might boot, but certainly no guarantee if same HP-laptop-related issue as I have had).

So I hope your problem is something else and some of the 'other' advice on this thread works for you, but does sound suspiciously like Secure Boot related issue (and funnily enough, turning OFF secure boot was NOT enough to get things going on my machine, so more security involved somehow - alas, I don't know the details of how the latest and greatest 'security' UEFI stuff works; it seems to be getting much trickier and small distros like Puppy are under threat of not being able to be booted it seems to me).

A lot of the information provided on this forum re: booting via UEFI with secure boot or not is often only correct for the howto writer's own tested (perhaps a few years old) hardware. Unfortunately there are some machines out there which are much more difficult to boot Linux on (some later HP models being particularly difficult it seems - I had no problem with slightly earlier HP laptops so this really frustrating problem turned out to be a complete and unwelcome surprise to me...). It is reaching the stage (and going to become the 'norm') that every piece of firmware code and lib is going to need specially signed and every component involved in the boot process and maybe even running state... so simply signing grub2 isn't going to be enough and I wonder how we are going to cope with this since upstream repos firware and so on, for example from Ubuntu, are only going to be signed with Ubuntu keys).

Even if you make a special puppy.cer uefi type stick and register via Mok to your UEFI/bios, fossapup may be too old, but maybe you could then try VoidPup64 at that stage since that may have newer libs, firmware, and kernel than the likes of old fossapup; or try KLV-Airedale at that stage. Anyway, hope it is indeed something simpler like BionicPup and XenialPup simply being too old generally for your recent laptops.

[Barrowman]

Okay guys, thanks for all the help.
I downloaded - Fossapup64 9.5 and Rosawriter. I ran it and told it to write to the USB stick I had Mint 20 on previously. Success at last. Certainly very fast on my Dell. Needs a lot of tidying up. Don't like that it shows Icons for all my discs and a few other things. The option 'Remove' is probably ok but On Mint and others it says ' Unpin from Panel' so 'Remove sounds much more drastic. New users will probably worry but I would just do it and if it did create a problem I would just re-install to the stick.
Thanks again.

[bigpup]

Puppy is a different Linux operating system.

It does some things differently than other Linux OS's.

Before you start removing icons from the desktop and making Puppy Linux look like some other Linux OS.

Try using it and seeing how it works.

Learn to do things a different way.

Puppy Linux does not auto mount drives and partitions by default.
The drive icons on the desktop are there to give you a quick way to mount and unmount drive partitions.
Yes it is a different way to do things.
So what!

All kinds of settings you can change, but you need to use Puppy Linux for a little time and see what you really want to change.
Just because it works a different way is not a reason to change it.

Note:
Desktop icons remove option does exactly that.
Removes the desktop icon.
The program can still be started from the menu.

Do not remove the trash desktop icon.
That icon is how you access the Puppy trash. (it is actually a program, a Rox app)
Drag and drop to it to put something in the trash.
Right click on it to see the options menu and access the trash.

[wizard]

@Barrowman

To help you manage the drive icons try: Menu>System>Puppy Event Manager>Rox icons. You'll find settings you can change, maybe do what you want. For other desktop management task, read this viewtopic.php?t=5312.

Glad it's working.

wizard

[Barrowman]

@wizard, thanks. I appreciate puppy isn't Ubuntu or Redhat so it's good to find out how I can tidy it up to my liking.

@bigpup, thanks for your input. I've run slackware, Mandrake, later Mandriva, Redhat Ubuntu DSL and Mint. They are all different and in each case I set about getting it how I wanted it. So it's no different with Puppy. I have lots of these icons displaying because I have 2 in the PC from which 5 icons show as far as I remember, one external I use with timeshift on Mint which has 2 partitions and the USB Stick with 2 partitions. I also have an nfs share which I'm running on a raspberry Pi with a 2 TB disc attached to it although at least it doesn't show up.