MandrivaOne on an SD Card

[CastrTroy]

I have an Acer 3680 laptop and I'm interested in the feasibility of booting from an SD Card. I think it would end up saving on battery power quite a bit. I have an internal SD slot which I would prefer to use, which shows up as /dev/mmcblk0, or the alternative is to use a USB SD card adapter. My computer will boot off the USB Key, but not off the SD Card slot.

 

I was hoping I could put an entry into grub (located on the hard drive) to boot from the SD card slot. I'm not sure of the exact syntax to use, as all the GRUB entries have (hd0,1) near the beginning, and this wouldn't be a hard disk.

 

I also can't get the device to boot from the USB Card, because I think it needs a boot sector. I can just write the ISO directly to the SD Card, which allows me to mount it as an iso9660 file system, but my laptop doesn't seem to want to boot off that. I've also tried formatting as ext3, and copying the files from the CD onto the drive, but that doesn't seem to boot either.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ianw1974]

Hi, booting from USB is most likely the only way you'd be able to do it. However, a lot of read/write operations on a USB stick will soon wear it out, so maybe consider an external USB hard disk instead. Either way, the grub stuff will still be the same.

 

First, you'd have to set the BIOS to boot from the USB stick before the hard disk. Second, boot the CD so that you can install the OS, and see where the USB stick appears, as /dev/sda or /dev/sdb. Chances are it will be /dev/sdb since it will always or should always recognise your internal hard disk as the first disk to use. The USB disk at /dev/sdb would therefore be hd1 for grub, and the last number is the partition where /boot resides. If /boot resides within the / partition, then use the number for this. The last number always starts at 0 for the first partition on the disk, the second being 1, and so on. Therefore, if / was the first partition, it would be hd1,0.

 

Never tried to SD, would have to google and test to see if I could get it working. If it did work, it would be better to use SD or CompactFlash for the OS than a USB stick. I'd go with an external hard disk drive connected via USB though.

[mindwave]

i know a LOT of mini distros now a days are coming pre loaded on CF cards w/ an IDE adapter.

 

so i couldnt see why you COULDNT, but I dont know the technicals behind an SD enough to know the details.

 

HOWEVER 2 great places to start.

 

1) MCNL - there is a sub forum here that will lead you to the downloads etc, only downside is the main writer retired, and the rest of us are still struggling with 2008, so it stopped at 2007.1

 

2) alternatively is PCLINUXOS - a GREAT mandriva based distro, the only thing I DONT like is the synaptic package manager. other than that it is a VERY active community remaster, I just loaded their BEL remaster as my file/FTP server and its pretty slick and simple!

 

j

[kfoss]

I would hesitate to put a distro on an SD card or CF card unless you make it read only. As mentionned before about USB flash drives, flash devices have limited write capacities. You'll need to mount the SD card read-only if you want the card to last.

[mindwave]

you know I see these statments about "limited write life spans" of SD and usb keys all over the internet, yeat I have been using my MDV FLASH (2gb version) since the 1st week they came out, and have made a dozen of my OWN flsh drives based on MCNL for 2 years and not had a single issue with any of them.

 

I know for a fact that the majority of the usb keys I buy are much lower quality than the flash, so you'd think they'd go 1st, but nope never had a read/write/seek error on any of them.

 

j