Ok so you have WinXP and want to do a frugal install of puppy but are worried you will mess something up. I am about to show you the easiest and best way to frugal install Puppy Linux if you have WinXP installed. This may seem time consuming but its not. I just have to explain in detail what to do. You really can’t mess anything up at all. The only thing you need to need to pay attention to is when you edit the boot.ini file. But then it would only take an idiot to mess that. BTW the boot.ini file is the only windows file that you touch In a traditional frual install you can mess up windows to the point it won’t boot if you don’t know what you are doing. Which would be me . I have used this for Slax and other Puppy installs to. I just added more to the menu.lst as you will be able to after reading this.
 

1. First we need to download Grub4Dos. Get it here: download.gna.org/grub4dos/ . The newest version is always down at the bottom. Be sure not to get anything that says alpha or beta.
 
2. Ok you have now downloaded grub4dos. Next you need to extract it using winrar or any other zip program. Now that it is unzipped we need to remove these two files:
 
menu.lst
grldr
 
3. The rest you will no longer need. Place the two files I mentioned above in your root directory in windows. That would be where ever your windows is installed. That is usually C: but can be any other drive letter. We will use C: as an example.
 
4. Ok we now have that part done. Next we need to extract the Puppy Linux .iso . That is the file you download before you burn it to a CD. Use the same method you used to extract the grub4dos program.
 
5. Ok you now should have a folder of contents. Copy the extracted files and place them in the root of the partition you have chosen. We will use D: as an example but you can put it in C: along with windows.
 
From running puppy you may notice the following to things in puppy your:
 
C: partition is usually recognized as hda1 or sda1
 
D: partition is usually recognized as hda2 or sda2
 
Make note of that when you have previously booted puppy. My second partition is recognized as sda3 in my computer instead of sda2. So if you are not sure boot back into puppy using your live cd. You will need to know that for the next step but we will use D: as sda2 in this example.
 
6. Go back to C: and open the menu.lst in a text editor. It will show an example of a menu.lst inside just delete all of that. Copy and paste this into the now empty menu.lst
 
Quote:

 
This is a menu.lst for I forget what Puppy I used but it worked for every Puppy I frugal installed without having to change. So it doesn’t really matter. Ok notice the (hd0,0) ? I’ll tell you what this means real quick.
 
hd is for harddrive. the numbers stand for (which hard drive, and partition) The first of anything is always represented by the number 0
 
Our example computer has only 1 hard drive and 3 partitions.
 
So the first number will always stay 0 because its the first and only harddrive we will use. The partions on the other hand will start at zero and go up like this:
 
sda1 or hda1 (hd0,0)
sda2 or hda2 (hd0,1)
sda3 or hda3 (hd0,2)
 
Ok we now know that sda2 is the partition where we placed the files from the extracted iso. Now edit the menu.lst to look like:
 
Quote:

 
That step is now done and we only have one more step to do before we can use our new frugal install of puppy. We need to edit the boot.ini of Windows to do that:
 
Right click on the My Computer icon in windows, Go down to properties click on it, Now click on the Advanced tab, Go down to where it says “Startup and Recovery” click on settings. In “Startup and Recovery” click on edit this now opened your boot.ini file which should look similar to this one.
 
Quote:

 
Now add this to the bottom of the last line: C:\GRLDR=”Start Grub”
 
It should now look like this:
 
Quote:

 
Now save it and reboot. Now during the boot you will see something like this
 
Quote:
Windows XP Home
Start Grub
 

Go to Start Grub and choose how you want to boot Puppy
 
Congtatulations you have just frugal installed Puppy Linux the easiest way.