When installing puppy, it gets stuck after "Searching for Puppy files..."

Hi - I am new to Linux and I am trying to install puppy on an old IBM thinkpad 600X (10gb hd, 196mb ram)

When installing puppy from a cd, it loads up and does the kernel stuff before "Searching for Puppy files in computer disk drives" - this takes about 10 minutes before saying "pup_421.sfs not found. Dropping out to initial ramdisk console" then it goes to "/bin/sh can't access tty; jon control turned off"

then it stays like that and doesn't continue

Please help! Is there anything I can do / anything I am doing wrong?

Thanks

you know, for all the talk about how "simple" puppy is to install, I found it harder than any other distro....or more steps involved any how, you have to copy some of the puppy files manually onto the partition...there is detailed instructions on the puppy linux forums, I'm not techy enough to explain it, but I was able to do it eventually.

the last time i used puppy linux on my pc it booted from the cd and didn't install on the pc. The HDD are mounted and any data transaction are stored on the HDD if wanted , so next time you start puppy linux it searches for the old fie ".sf" to find what all it did last time. SO I wonder whether you have installed it or u r simply booting from the CD.

I am trying to run it in RAM, ignoring previous sessions, but it still tries to looks for previous files, and then it gets stuck - is there a way to avoid this or get past it?

You can look through here to see if you can get past your problems. I have installed Puppy Sucessfully on a IBM 390E using this page/link.

Puppy Linux Discussion Forum :: View topic - Index of resources for Beginners Help forum

You can also try booting up using this cheat code.

Quote:

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puppy acpi=off

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Another one is

Quote:

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puppy acpi=force

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On a older IBM laptop like yours you also need to burn a Puppy 2.15 or 3.01 iso instead of the latest edition. Those 2 ran fine on my IBM 390E and a slower Compaq 1540 DM.

One last thing I thought of. You might have a bad download if you didn't do a md5sum check. Your cdrom could be on the fritz also. Bad cdrom drive will throw errors.

Check it with trying to boot up Damn Small Linux Distro or maybe Slitaz and see if it boots up all the way first.

Common reasons for not finding the files is unsupported kernel by the computer.
Please look up what computer architecture has your laptop. I presume that it's i586 because it's old. Please have in mind, that Puppy since version 3.01 has been released in two variants - default and retro, with different kernels.
For example, Puppy 4.21 default edition comes with kernel 2.6.25.16, which is for i686, and retro, 2.6.21.7, which is also for i686.
Puppy 3.01 kernels are as follows - 2.6.21.7 for the default and 2.6.18.1 for the retro, which this time is for i586.
Try using 3.01retro, 2.16 or below, which have kernel 2.6.18 or below.

BTW, I had some experience with booting Puppy on a Celeron 366 MHz, i586, and had sucsess in frugal install with Puppy 3.01retro.