Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

About all the cloudbooks like HP Stream and Acer Aspire One Cloudbook, have a built in SD card reader. Though none of them have a bios that allows booting from this SD card reader. Refind/Clover also dont have the drivers.

So after trying and succeeding booting an NVMe ssd installed with adapter in place of wifi card on Acer Aspire (it has 32bit UEFI so couldnt use refind/clover) using Wizards split install viewtopic.php?t=11468 I thought I WOULD try it to boot from an SD card in the internal SD card reader. I already had a frugal install on what remains of the eMMC drive, its got lot bad places so little of the original 16GB is usable, a save file on this eMMC not stable. But enough to install BookwormPup64 and GRUB2 (via BookwormPup64). I made duplicate install on the 256GB NVMe card and used wizards menuentry... that works.

Code: Select all

menuentry 'bw64 test'{
search --no-floppy --set=root --fs-uuid 21dea449-bad1-4e79-b67c-554004eb1ab4
linux /bw64/vmlinuz root=UUID=5b3cfc1c-d752-4686-b6af-82c8c4f39b6e psubdir=/bw64 pmedia=usbflash pfix=nocopy,fsck
initrd /bw64/initrd.gz
}

-change all the "bw64" to the directory name you chose.
-change "21dea449-bad1-4e79-b67c-554004eb1ab4" to the UUID for your boot device Puppy directory partition
-change "5b3cfc1c-d752-4686-b6af-82c8c4f39b6e" to the UUID for your NVME Puppy directory partition
-save your changes
-reboot and test

Made another similar menuentry for Puppy partition on the SD card. It worked. All this does is use GRUB2 to first load kernel on a bootable drive the bios recognizes and can boot from, in this case what remains of the eMMC (could do this from Puppy on usb stick, and remove it once Puppy on SD boots), then have GRUB2 switch to identical install on the non-supported drive. It is just using the driver built into the linux kernel from initial boot, to see and access the SD card reader in this case.

Now do I recommend this? NO, good quality SD cards cost as much as a similar size used NVMe ssd which is far faster and much longer lasting than an SD card. If you dont want to open your crapbook and use the wifi card socket with adapter, you can get a usb adapter for the NVMe and boot it from usb. These little crapbooks do boot from USB natively, they only boot from either USB or the eMMC natively. I will also say I tried this with another SD card that failed. Couldnt boot Puppy off of it to save me. Guessing search timed out. These can be SLOW. So some luck is involved.

I will also mention there is info on doing this on the old forum too. People have been experimenting with this even back in the netbook days. Though lot of these descriptions tend to make average person's eyes glaze over. Its pretty simple though for all practical purposes you install Puppy on a bootable drive and use GRUB2 to boot it. Then do same on a non-bootable drive. Use Wizard's menuentry appropriately modified in the grub.cfg on the bootable drive to do the transition during boot. and Bob's your uncle. Well assuming your SD card reader likes your SD card..... SD cards were designed for things like cameras to store pictures, not being used to boot an operating system. I have found good usb thumb drive to be more stable than SD cards. NVMe and SATA m.2 cards are lot faster and more stable.

@mouldy :-

I amazed myself last night by getting Puppy to boot direct from my HP Pavilion desktop rig's internal SD card-reader. Did you read it?

viewtopic.php?p=126636#p126636

Which tells me the HP's UEFI/BIOS ain't as crap as I thought.....and also went to show the issue was more likely than not a dirty/crudded-up card reader slot, with mucky contacts. It was FULL of dust, when I blew it out with an 'air duster' last night...

It's recognising cards consistently now.

Mike.

Always worth a try I suppose. Lot more convenient if its just dirty drive or something. Though if bios supports booting from SD drive it should show in the bios even if the actual drive is mechanically dysfunctional. My old desktop's bios shows any cdrom connected whether its functional or not. If its fubar and you try to boot from it, will tell you no bootable disk found. However I have not heard of any of those "cloudbooks" having bios that can boot from the built in SD card reader. They intentionally wanted to make it as inconvenient as possible to boot from anything except the eMMC drive. Now it will see an SD card in a USB card reader, but then thats USB and of course not as convenient. The whole idea was to force you do everything online 'in the cloud'.... like a chromebook. The computers with a SD card reader that can boot are usually internally connected to the USB system. Nearly any modern computer can boot from USB. Even the old ones if you say booted PLOP from floppy or cd could boot from usb.

Now I still remember when computers could ONLY boot from internal hard drive or floppy disk drive. USB wasnt even a thing. They couldnt even boot from cdrom. Some Russian guy came up with a DOS boot floppy you booted and it would look for and hot boot a bootable cd on cdrom. That was before PLOP. Wow guess that was a LONG time ago.

mouldy wrote: Tue Jul 23, 2024 8:39 pm

The computers with a SD card reader that can boot are usually internally connected to the USB system. Nearly any modern computer can boot from USB. Even the old ones if you say booted PLOP from floppy or cd could boot from usb.

Yes; that was the thing I noticed when it began functioning. It showed on the desktop as a USB drive, so I assume the reader must be connected to one of the internal USB headers on the mobo.....

Mike.