Not sure where to go with this one, so posting in the newby section. I am after all still a newbie at linux.

I have a laptop, one of these low power low hd netbooks, on which i would like to boot through the sd card.

Bios does not see sd cards, only usb sticks and the internal drive. USB sticks would be great, if only they would not protrube. Even the small usb sticks still protrube.

So I searched how I may change the bios, not sure I want to risk bricking my machine by trying to force a non official bios, especially since I couldnt find newbie instructions to follow.

So I tried refind hoping to find a driver for the sd card, no luck, there dont seem to be any.

So I found https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromSD and tried this with ubuntu, then mint, full installs and install usb sticks.

I always error at the chroot step, complaining about bash. Even when I copied bash over, but still complaining chroot.

Is there a bootloader capable of booting from an sd not in bios?
Is there a relatively easy way to change the bios to recognize the sd?
Is there another way to initiate the boot from the internal drive and hand over tot he SD?
Is there another way to get sd card booting on an internal sd card reader that is not listed in bios?

Thanks!

Can you expand on the BIOS not seeing SD cards?
Is it BIOS, or EUFI?
I take it you can access SD cards when booted into the currently installed OS and from those started from USB sticks?
Is it possible you're looking in the wrong place in your BIOS/UEFI and are looking at removable media and not hard disk drives when trying to boot from it?
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but have you tried simply booting to an installer and pointing that at the SD card?

If all else fails there are USB drives which hardly protrude at all.

YES to "Is there a bootloader capable of booting from an sd not in bios?"
I already booted my samsung NC10 from the SD slot when the BIOS dont see it as boot device.. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d-card-921471/
a) install PLOP bootloader onto the USB stick (or the HDD or CD) https://www.plop.at/de/bootmanager/download.html
b) you will (most probably) see your SD card in the slot. Just choose it in the PLOP boot menue and you can start your system which is on the SD card.
If I remember, not all plop versions could see my NC10 slot. Just try the latest.

bios, efi, uefi all get confused. I might get the words wrong, so thanks for pointing me to clarify. Also sd, ssd and sdxc etc might get comfused.

In aptio bios, the blue screen at startup, any sd card with linux installed on it does not get seen. 4 usb options usb, the internal hd and then efi. 6 options total but no sdhc/xc card. when one of the options has a bootable device the name changes to uefi with a description.
I tried them all, there is no sdhc/xc card listed even though there is an sdhc/xc card in the slot with a dd copy of a linux distro. tried both mint and ubuntu. I even tried rescatux on an sdhc/xc.

When booted from a usb stick the sdhc/xc card can be seen, copied etc to it. Strangely, the sdhc/xc card gets mmcblk0 and the internal ssd hard disk mmcblk1.

I booted to usb stick installer and installed to sdhc/xc with no problem, but upon rebooting the sdhc/xc is not listed in bios, the blue ami aptio screen.

In bios, the blue aptio screen, secure and fast booting are off. So i came to conclusion, but i may be very wrong, that bios does not support sdhc/xc card booting.

And sdhc/xc card booting, some sort of, is what i would like to achieve.

I hope I didnt make a mess of my description, thanks!

Thank you for replying so accurately.
I still wonder whether, on boot, you may have missed the option. I have to admit, though, I will have to try this now on my laptops. Not that I doubt you, just the way things are.
If I find anything I'll post back.

I looked at plop, but i dont have windows. So I made attempts with plopkext, but being a noob I couldnt get it to work and i failed to grasp instructions on the plop web site. Would love to try plop again, can anyone direct me to a step/by/step instrution without the need for windows? Thanks!

"I looked at plop, but i dont have windows" I dont understand.
5 ways to start plop https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/plpbt.bin.html
Take your time. You will need time before you get all done if you are a totally newcomer (or ask a linux friend).

I find the most efficient way to use plop is to burn the ISO to a CD if the computer to be booted has an optical drive, since almost all BIOS are able to boot from a CD. If the computer has no optical drive, "burning" the ISO to a USB drive is the next best thing.

Neither of these steps requires Windows.

OK, so, yes, it appears that a lot of laptops just won't boot from SD card -- I had thought it was just me not looking around properly but not even GRUB sees the SD card in one of my laptops.
I can recommend the tiny USB sticks if the internal SSD can't be used,

The best place to start is to find out how the sd card attaches to the system.


Then I'd look at the ability of your sd to boot. Not all are designed to be bootable.

In a number of computers, bios may see the usb or sd card as a type of hard drive and you select the order of hard drive, not the order of usb/sd/floppy sort of choice.

Be sure to look at bios for hard drive's. See if any choice is there to re-scan or find.

Plop may work but I've had better luck usually using grub that has the ability to use how your sd card connects.

Get a few netinstall cd's and see if they can find the sd card.

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If you can boot from a usb flash drive you should be able to boot from an sd card using a usb adapter:

https://www.amazon.com/Transcend-mic...SIN=B009D79VH4

It's a handy device to have and only $10.

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The SD card reader built into the laptop probably isn't bootable (directly anyway). You can probably boot it from grub on any other boot-able medium though.

"c" for command mode
GRUB> insmod part_gpt
GRUB> insmod ext2
GRUB> ls
GRUB> configfile (hd1,gpt1)/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Or whatever the bootloader is on the card. Or you could just use an SD card reader to boot the card, but protrusion. The above is how I boot my GPT partition SSD inside a desktop, with a bios that can only boot DOS (MBR) partitioning schemes it seems. I can re-appropriate 32GB sticks all day long, but a 120GB SSD, I aint got time for that.

Alternatively to the above, have a bootable linux on the card, and one on a stick. And update-grub on the on the stick so you can select the card inside from the sticks grub menu. Once you're past the boot loader and onto the card, you can remove the stick (in theory). In short, boot stick with card in place. Login and update-grub (as root). Reboot and select the menu option for the card. Remove the stick. Assuming everything works. Various gotchas depending on things, 32 bit bios, 64 bit os, and other hardware specific quirks.

Burned plop iso to usb in the past, and again today. Searching for a reason why it does not work I stumbled on https://forum.plop.at/index.php?topic=1570.0
I think what is happening with plop is that it is not uefi, and i think my laptop only takes uefi, no legacy booting. Only supporting uefi would explain why some of the linux iso usb sticks never got to booting, they may not have been uefi.

The sd card reader I think is connected to pci. Which command would tell me where it sits and what vendor it is?

I would live to get my head arond grub, alas, man pages and trying has mostly led me to broken systems. How does one configure grub? Is there a GUI tool I could use while booted in a linux?

Built in SD Card readers are generally not bootable devices. You just have to use USB. You can get microSD cards and readers that only portrude 3/8" ~10mm.

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Plop is very "generic" and makes assumptions. That it's /dev/sdc (cdrom) and that you're trying to boot /dev/sda1. Which is less and less likely these days. Or at least that was my impression when I last used it (a decade ago?).

You can accomplish the same thing with grub, if you know the lingo. Or have a functional usb install to customize grub (update-grub) to boot the other thing. It is harder with UEFI, but not impossible. The two main things that prevent a functional boot is the root= parm that is passed to the kernel, and the contents of /etc/fstab. You can boot without a /etc/fstab, although with systemd, it mounts / as read-only when that is the case. Which complicates things, but can be worked around if you know the lingo (mount -o remount,rw /). Otherwise read-only means that any customizations do not take when you reboot, and any logging telling you what failed doesn't get written.