How to boot from Puppy TAHR Linux installed on SD card in HP630 Notebook?
 

Hi all,

I am new to Linux, so while answering, please use as simple laymen terms as possible!

I have HP 630 Notebook with Windows Ultimate 64-Bit OS installed by me (not the manufacturer-HP). I installed Puppy TAHR Linux on a 2GB SD Card I had from a CD after burning the .iso on it. Then, rebooted the system, nothing happened. I made changes in the BIOS and selected boot priorities; then too, nothing happened! I came to know that to have multiple OS's boot options while booting, I need to install bootloader. I installed Grub2Win; it did not work at all! Next, I tried with EasyBCD, it hanged! Is there any way to have dual boot option while booting - One Win 7 and another Puppy TAHR Linux?

Regards,
Vijay Anand.

Hi Vijay and welcome to LQ.

I can only check documentation because I don't have an HP630 notebook, and my suspicion is that this system, like many systems, cannot boot from an SD card. You can boot from network, hard drive, USB, or DVD, but not a card like SD or Compact Flash. I don't know if this is a technical limitation where they can only pick so many options, or if they made a conscious decision in the BIOS development. But it seems that a lot of models do not allow a "boot from SD" option.

I think the rest you have done is fine and you should burn that ISO to a USB stick and see if you can boot off of that stick.

I think you are right...It has options to boot from what you specified and not an SD card!

SD card readers are not bootable devices, You can use a SD Card to usb converter and boot from that, though. But why not use a microSD card in a USB converter. It's small, high capacity, convenient.

You're using Windows 7..that you just installed? Why? Seems your laptop is an i3, certainly capable of running Windows 10 easily.

And while you need simple answers...we need details in your questions. Saying "nothing happened", "it did not work at all", and "it hanged", really doesn't give us anything to go on. How did you burn the ISO image to the SD card??? Just copying it there won't do anything; you have to follow a procedure to make it bootable:
http://puppylinux.org/wikka/Installa...al#hn_Appendix

And their website specifically says that you should NOT be doing what you're doing:
http://puppylinux.org/main/How%20NOT...ll%20Puppy.htm

Dual-booting Linux is easy, and there are THOUSANDS of tutorials out there on how to do it, but it seems you should pick a different distro to do this with, one that has better dual-booting support.