Den 2016-06-05 kl. 07:16, skrev Basil Fernie:
As always, I am asking for something so simple, so obvious, that it
cannot be possible... or can it?
I want to install Lubuntu 16.04 to the SDHC card in a laptop and make it
bootable, so that I can run and work with the laptop without an internal
or external hard drive.
Background: Someone gave me a Samsung V511 or similar, with quite a nice
spec but a very dead HDU and battery pack. Rather than spend money
restoring it, she bought a new laptop.
Obviously I ran a few versions of Linux through it, booting from USB
sticks. Would be rather nice on my desk, I thought, leaving my Lenovo to
be truly portable. But how about booting from an SDHC card as a
semi-permanent installation? Fast, quiet, power-mingy, enough space on a
16 or 32GB card for core apps and quite a lot of working data for
various projects which could of course be archived onto the external
terabyte-class USD 3.0 drive. No searching for ports and pushing/pulling
things in and out... Poor man's SSD-plus-personal cloud, anyone?
Lubuntu 16.04 LTS beckoned with its "Startup Disk Creator" option under
System Tools. The whole process ran beautifully, with the 16GB SDHC
Level10 being recognised as a legitimate target for the installation
from ISO, and the installation concluded without demur or any error
messages noted.
However booting failed with an "Operating system not found" message. The
Samsung's boot options menu offers half a dozen USB devices, none of
which does the trick.
Before i throw any more time at this idea, can someone tell me if it is
inherently impossible because an SDHC cannot be Grubbed or whatever, or
is it just an outdated unimaginative BIOS chip on the Samsung which
could be flashed into the 21st century, 2nd decade?
Thanks as always,
Basil Fernie
Hi Basil,
I can boot from SD and SD micro cards, but 'not everywhere'. Some card
adapters work, some work for read/write but do not work for booting. I
would say many USB adapters work: I can boot from cards in small
adapters as well as boxes for several card models (not only SD).
I tried now (just in order to reply) in the built-in slots in two
laptops, and they did *not* boot from an SD card that boots via USB
adapters. I know, that some computers boot from cards in built-in slots.
If you have too few USB ports on the computer, I can tell you that it
works to boot an SD card via a USB adapter via a USB hub. I just did it :-)
So it depends what is behind/inside the slot/adapter and how it is
connected to the motherboard.
-o-
SD cards will wear out if you run an installed operating system from it
because of repeated write operations on the same memory cells. So if you
manage to boot from it, you should tweak it to avoid some of the wear.
Add the mount option noatime in /etc/fstab. Do not locate any swap
partition on the SD card. Turn off journaling. See this link,
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/UEFI-and-BIOS#Final_system_tweaks
An alternative is to use a persistent live system, and if there is
enough RAM use the boot option toram. A persistent live system does not
write as frequently to the drive as an installed system.
Best regards
Nio
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