Please help I've been reading about and working on getting this (puppy linux) installed on a PII system all day for my friend, every time I reboot to see if I can boot off the hard drive, after what universal installer for puppy linux says is successful, I get a no boot no error, or for a little while before I erased the drive completely (binary zero) it would say loading GRUB and then error, which now I cannot reproduce and can't remember what exactly the error was, the point is I have sucessfully installed other distros but this one takes the cake, any help would be ever so appreciated.

(btw this is the only disro that will work, DSL doesn't support the wireless network adapter I need to use, and worst of all DSL won't install the correct mouse driver whether it's ps2 or usb.)

Also so I don't get flamed too badly, yes I did reinstall puppy linux after I erased and reformatted the drive, then used the universal installer to install GRUB which came back positive on installing GRUB to the MBR, I am only using one other partition on the drive and it is a linux swap as /dev/sda2 I am trying to install puppy on /dev/sda1. I saw the document on configuring GRUB to boot puppy if you are using an ntfs partition with windows installed also, (it does not apply to my situation). I have tried both frugal and full installs, and I am installing GRUB automatically to the MBR of the drive /dev/sda all without any install errors.

Ok this is my last edit the error is:
"GRUB loading stage1.5.

GRUB loading, please wait...
Error 18
_"

After you install puppy (full install on sda1), try editing /boot/grub/menu.lst manually (just reboot with puppy or any other live CD if needed).
It should have something like this (assuming sda1 is indeed your root partition):

PS: also check if sda1 is set to be bootable (start gparted click on sda1 and select Manage Flags, boot should be enabled)

You could also try the "expert install" for grub in the universal installer. In this way you can point grub directly to the partition you have installed Puppy to.

thanks for the replies, however I tried all of what you are saying to do but it did not help.There must be a problem with the computer, I will just scap it and use a slightly more modern system for the project.It is only 300 mhz.

ok put the puppy disk in and type puppy pfix=ram then press enter. Now after you get to the desk top after all as a new system look at you hard drive make sure your puppy is installed.
If you did a full install you will just see a normal linux files . if you did a frugal install it will be puppy folder. if you did a full install open that drive and go to the /boot/grub/menu.1st file and edit it this way if it is a frugal install

so now that your still booted in puppy go to the menu and choose install grub choose simple put the gub folder on drive that your puppy is installed on and then put the grub on the mbr. I know it say it can be dangerous but that is where we put it and have been putting uit on linux for years. now that you did that
by defalt puppy writes this in the /boot/menu.1st if you are doing a frugal install on top of windows puppy will not install the grub boot loader it only installs on a linux file system and in the directory /boot/

for a 300 mhz computer you need to use puppy 2.0 or 2.1 and everything will work great. but not the new puppy it needs mor ram do to the newer kernel. to install puppy you need to boot puppy 2.01 and run gparted make a ext3 partition and a swap partition swap about twice the amount of your ram up to 512 then install. good luck.

if your windows partition is fat32 and you have a frugal install on windows make a c:\boot\grub directory. Copy the /usr/?/grub/i386-pc/stage* files and a frugal menu.lst to the c:\boot/grub. manually install grub:
Will not work on ntfs file system
never mind I see where you have already formatted the harddrive, you can still try a manual install of grub and see if that works. What version of puppy are you using. I had 3.1 working on a compaq pentitum II with no problems.

ignore this fat fingered keys