How would you like to be able to revive your old PC for free? In part one of this article, we told you how Puppy Linux can revive PCs with Operating Systems before XP. Yep, ancient PCs. Click here to learn how to find and download Puppy Linux for free.
Today, we’ll look at how to install Puppy Linux from the USB drive we created in part 1. Plus that drive into the old computer’s USB port.
Start your old machine up and get into the bios. The way to enter the bios will be different from machine to machine, but the most common is by pressing F2 on the bios boot up.
Go to the “Boot” tab and go down to the “Boot Device Priority” tab.
Select your USB, usually named as a Generic Flash Disk as your main boot device. Then move to the “Exit” tab and choose to save changes. The machine will reboot by itself after saving your settings.
Your machine will now start and boot into the Linux that’s installed in your USB. You can stop here and carry the USB around as a portable PC, or you can permanently install the Linux distribution on your laptop/PC.
After booting up from the USB, click on the “Install” button that’s on the desktop. A window will pop-up, choose the first option “Universal Installer” to continue with the installation.
Select the option “Internal (IDE or Sata) hard drive” to install it directly on your machine, or USB Flash drive if you’re going to install it as a full operating system into the USB, then click okay.
Select the hard drive that you’ll use. You can check which hard drive you have inside the machine in the bios by going to Boot>hard drives, although usually a laptop/PC will only have one by default. Click okay, once you’ve selected it.
In the next page there will be three buttons. Click the one to the right of the Filesystem partition box to open G-parted.
Select the drive that you’re going to install in and right click on it. Unmount the drive, then format it into ext2 or ext3, then click on the apply button at the top right corner of the window. Now close G-parted and you’ll be taken back to the previous window.
Select the first button on the page to install puppy on your hard drive. Click okay on the next page and wait for it to create a folder for you. Then restart your machine without saving any changes and voila! An old PC that runs as fast as any other PC out there!
~Katreen