Booting from SD card?

[Thomas8675309]

Has anyone figured out whether it is possible to boot from the SD card? If I push F2 or F12 at the first boot screen, it appears the BIOS does not recognize the card and doesn't offer it as a boot option. (Once I finish booting, the SD card is recognized, of course.)

On my old eee 701 (which I have now sold), I installed Xubuntu on the SD card and left the default Xandros on the SSD, and could dual boot between them. That way, if I screwed things up too much on the Xubuntu partition on the SD card(which happened occasionally as I experimented), I could also boot from the original OS on the SSD as well.

I'd love to do the same on the Aspire One, but so far it seems you can't boot from the SD card. If someone can tell me different (or confirm that this is indeed a BIOS limitation), that would be very helpful.

Assuming that there's no way to boot from the SD card, would a reasonable alternative be to resize the Linpus partition, make a small additional partition on the SSD (say, 50 MB or so), install the ubuntu /boot directory on that new partition, and install the rest of ubuntu on a partition on the SD card? That way, I could continue to dual boot (presumably using grub installed by Ubuntu) but leave the SSD mostly untouched.

Any help or suggestions appreciated.

Best regards,

Tom

 

[Guest]

I would also like an answer on this one.
I just created myself a nice slax SD bootable, and I can select it

 

[mattjones]

I just created myself a nice slax SD bootable, and I can select it

But can you get Slax to run? For me the boot hangs at:
Module dependencies up to date (no new kernel modules found)

 

[Guest]

I am running the BT3 USB version fine on the One now.
Just trying to get it to work with injection.

 

[optimisme]

Hi

I think this is a very good option, and I would like to use Ubuntu on SD without any change on AspireOne. I've been trying to do this, but for me is impossible to:

1 - Create a bootable SD card
2 - When running live ubuntu from USB and installing it to an SD card, it exits writing boot loader.

Anyone arrived further on this topic ?

Thanks in advance

 

[adrian]

hi i really don't know much about linux but would this scenario be possible.
Install linux or windows on sd card, and the other os on the ssd. then install lets say grub on the the bootable usb drive.
so every time i want to boot the os from the sd card, then i first set my bios to boot from the usb flash drive and boot grub, and then from grub choose the win or linux on the sd card. this way the ssd would have absolutely no connection with the os on the sd card or with grub or any other boot loader. if somebody can explain me how to do this i volunteer to try this out

 

[qbic2005]

I don't really think you can make the ONE boot from a sd card, I have however no spare card...

But what works fine is booting from an usb stick!
alright it may seem not as fancy, it will do the job... for example try slax, its only 190m for download ....

you will have to download the test version!!! not the main release. Further you can just follow the manual, copy the stuff from within the is to a usb stick , run the boot script .... plug it in your ONE and press F12 when booting "et voilà"

here the link:
ftp://slax.org/testing/slax-test/slax608-rc5.iso

 

[retsaw]

hi i really don't know much about linux but would this scenario be possible.
Install linux or windows on sd card, and the other os on the ssd. then install lets say grub on the the bootable usb drive.
so every time i want to boot the os from the sd card, then i first set my bios to boot from the usb flash drive and boot grub, and then from grub choose the win or linux on the sd card. this way the ssd would have absolutely no connection with the os on the sd card or with grub or any other boot loader. if somebody can explain me how to do this i volunteer to try this out

With GRUB? No, you can't do that. GRUB can only boot from devices that the BIOS can see since it uses the BIOS to read the device. Maybe there is another boot loader that can do that, but I'm not aware of any. If you actually start the boot process from the USB drive i.e. loading the Linux kernel and initrd, then Linux can carry on and use the SD card from there, but I think that is the closest you'll get.

 

[Grinder]

I think he's refering to booting from the internal drive be it the SSD or HDD then having a boot loader (running from the internal SSD or HDD) look and see if there is a card in the slot and booting from the slot. Seems like a feasable work around....

 

[apaige]

If you actually start the boot process from the USB drive i.e. loading the Linux kernel and initrd, then Linux can carry on and use the SD card from there, but I think that is the closest you'll get.

Might as well use a small /boot partition on the SSD for that.

 

[Grinder]

... aside from the fact that messing around with an SD card is a lot safer and quicker. Plus you have the option of playing with multiple OS otherwise you would just have a dual boot system.

 

[apaige]

I'm not sure you understood what I meant (if you did, nevermind). Instead of lugging a USB flash drive around just for booting, you could set up a small partition (maybe, I don't know, 50 megs) on the SSD, where you'd put the kernels of all the systems you want to boot, and install grub on the SSD's MBR. Then you'd add one grub entry for each OS. The trick is to set up the "root" value in grub's menu.lst to match the SSD's boot partition (e.g. "root (hd0,0)"), and use the "kernel" line to specify the right partition on the SD card (e.g. "kernel /boot/kernel-ubuntu root=/dev/mmcblk0p1"). Just to be safe, I'd also add the "rootwait" parameter to the kernel line (SD cards can get probed pretty late into the boot process). That's what I used to do when I wanted to run an OS on a USB flash drive and the computer couldn't boot directly from it.

You don't even need to add anything special to the operating system's configuration, just to copy its kernel (and initrd image if applicable) to the SSD's boot partition. The OS doesn't need to know how it got booted.