Booting from an SD card
 

Hi guys,

So anyway, I've used a program called Unetbootin to create an Ubuntu 8.10 Live CD installation on a 4Gb SDHC card with a physical write-protect switch. It runs just like a live CD (only much faster obviously) and cannot be written to, thus ensuring its integrity. But there's a big catch; it won't boot from the machine I created it for as its BIOS doesn't support such 'exotic' boot media. Boots up fine with a usb/sd adaptor on everything else though (typical!)

So I need a Grub guru to suggest a workaround so the card can be booted sequentially via the traditional boot sector on the machine's hard drive. This would be really neat if a solution could be found as this machine (a sub notebook) doesn't have a CD/DVD drive, but does have an SD slot in the side which this card slides flush into nicely, unlike using a USB pen drive which is sticky-outy is liable to get snapped off (in my frequent experience).

Any ideas?

TIA, CC.

This ain't my turf with SD cards but you could try

PLOP Bootmanager(floppy/CD/USB)
SuperGrubDisc

hope that helps some...

( http://linux.derkeiler.com/Newsgroup.../msg00011.html )

( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=712557 )

( http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/de...il/004902.html )

Also, I believe DSL can frugal install to SD cards-Debian based-may be your best bet?

This might be possible. Install grub on your SSD (do not forget to create /boot partition and format it). Edit your menu.lst / grub.conf hence it lists your SD as root partition in which you put Ubuntu kernel. And kernel should be compiled to include block devices as SD cards.

This might work only if Grub can see your drive geometry.

CMIIW.

Thanks, guys.

Well, I'm going to give it a shot. I've come across some additional info off the net on how to go about this, but it's pretty complicated and will really stretch my current Linux knowledge level to its absolute limit. Doubtless I'll have to return here for assistance from time to time!
BTW, interesting about CF cards being natively IDE. What a pity that for all the many card slots this netbook has, there's no CF one. :-(
Looks like it's SD or bust!

AFAIK, Grub is independent of drive geometry translations, so this at least shouldn't be a problem.