logoAlternative Flash-drive Installation Method for UEFI Boot

This page explains the method and steps to make a bootable flashdrive suitable for booting on UEFI systems. It assumes that you have booted into Fatdog and you have a copy of the ISO file handy, or you have followed a simplified installation method (in other words, you have a copy of the files from Fatdog distribution).


Firstly you must ensure that you have access to the Fatdog installation files. They are:
You can find these files inside Fatdog ISO distribution file; you can get access to these files by:

The steps

1) Make sure your flash drive has a FAT32 partition, and it is large enough (512M or more) to hold copies of Fatdog files. Some UEFI firmware accepts FAT16 too but the official standard requires FAT32. Most flash drives today ship with FAT32 factory-formatted so you usually don't even need to do this, but it is always good to check and confirm.

2) Name your partition as "FATDOG_LIVE". Use dosfslabel from terminal to do this.

3) Most UEFI firmware will accept any partition type if you use MBR partition. Some stricter ones don't; and in this case you need to set the partition type to type EF.

If you find that your flash drive is not listed ignored or not recognised by the UEFI firmware boot menu, this may be the case: use fdisk from terminal to do change the partition type as above.

Note: If you use GPT partition then the partition type must be set to EF00. Use gdisk to do this.

4) Do the previous steps above while your partition is *not* mounted. When done, mount your FAT32 partition (just click the drive icon from your desktop).

5) Copy vmlinuz, initrd, grub.cfg and fatdog.png from Fatdog ISO/CD/DVD/flash drive to this FAT32 partition.

6) Open terminal and cd to the path that contains the file efiboot.img. Then type "filemnt efiboot.img". A Rox window will appear. Do not close the terminal window.

7) Copy all the files from this window to your FAT32 partition.

8) Type "filemnt efiboot.img" once again on the same terminal that you did step 6. The rox window should close.

That's it! Unmount your flash drive and you're ready to boot. If you're feeling adventurous, you can go on and create additional partitions (e.g. ext4 or f2fs) on your flash drive for you to put your savefile/savedir there. You can also edit grub.cfg to meet your needs (e.g. adding boot parameters, removing unnecessary entries, etc).



Yet another alternate method

If you feel that the above steps are too complicated, Puppy Linux forum member Ted Dog has prepared a ZIP file that contains pre-packaged boot files extracted from efiboot.img.

All you need to do is: download the ZIP file, extract the content of the ZIP file to that your flash drive, and copy over Fatdog64 ISO file there too. The complete steps and the links to the ZIP file can be found here. The same method can be re-used to boot other Puppy Linux variants too.

Forum member cat&dog has alternate instructions based on Ted Dog's method that works for him, here.




Note 1: If you follow these methods, you do not need to run fix-usb.sh; in fact doing so will ruin your flash drive partitioning; so don't do that.

Note 2: All the configuration files produced by this method is editable. Actually all files are editable.

Note 3: Since this uses standard partition table, Gparted should be able to modify it as usual.