I have just done a bit of experimenting with Puppy 5.2.8, to see if there is a way to run it without buying all those CD-RWs. Can't find them and don't want a whole spindle anyway. I have never done this before, and confess to just floundering around with the options until it worked. Wouldn't offend me at all if someone improved on this procedure, or recommended a better way. All in the interest of education, you know? This may be the process they call a "Frugal Install". Don't think so, but can't tell for sure by reading the descriptions. ----- This method of using Puppy required about 900 mb free space on the HDD for the save file and the contents of the CD, might need more if you installed more softwares into Puppy. Advantages: - you can install and run more "stuff" than you can actually get on a CD-R. - you don't have to fiddle with the boot loader, just boot from the CD-R. - you don't have to format anything. - you don't have to restart to complete installation or updating. - The 2nd or 3rd boot is quite fast. Disadvantages: - you cannot dismount the partition that Puppy is running in. I don't much like that because none of my protections are in place. But as you said, your computers are imaged so should be OK. - you aren't taking your changes with you on the CD, they stay on the HDD. - I have not yet figured out how to avoid saving changes. ----- This is what worked on this xp desktop: Checked the partitions on here to be sure I could identify them in Puppy. burned lupu-5.2.8.005-libre1.iso to CD-R and booted from it. - set the date & time and started the firewall using default automagic. - used quickpet to download and install Firefox and Gimp. - Firefox automatically updated, then configured Firefox. - Played around a bit with the softwares. Everything worked OK. At poweroff, the screens explain the save options pretty well. Puppy offered to create a savefile, which I named 20161022_1, set to 512 mb, and put on C:, the OS partition. It is called "lupusave-20161022_1.2fs", is 512 mb. Puppy offered to save the contents of the boot CD to the HDD, to make booting faster. Clicked OK, another wait, then power off. This created a folder on C: called l5281204.053, containing a file called lupu_528.sfs at about 290 mb in size. Now when booting from the CD, Puppy automatically finds & loads those 2 new files. It boots faster, and the changes are saved. Also, FWIW, if something gums up as you are using puppy, you can delete those 2 new files and start again. Actually I only renamed them to something Puppy wouldn't recognize and started again, it was like starting the first time, had to rebuild those files. Post up how it goes when you have time.
I did a bit more tinkering with the Puppy live CD. This last boot was faster, about 1 minute 30 seconds from power on to desktop. The files previously saved to the HDD were found and booted, and all the changes from the last session had been saved. Puppy Linux is sort of fun. Just for the heck of it I created an odp file in LibreOffice and saved it as a .ppt file on sda5 (windows J: ). Easily done, just dragged it to the target folder and clicked on "Copy". Later in windows it opened and edited just fine using Powerpoint. Thought it might be worthwhile to post this screenshot. It shows sda2, (windows C: ) locked open. It also shows some of the windows boot files. I'm pretty sure they could be deleted by accident. I'm just not quite courageous enough to experiment with that. I do know the boot.ini file will open for editing. If those files were altered or deleted, windows would not boot, so a backup image saved on that HDD would not help, nor would Shadow Defender. The only way I can think of to ensure the security of your computers is to have an externally stored image available. No offense meant if I am telling you something you already know.
