Acer Aspire One boot from SDHC

[anfy]

I'm interested in this as well... please post if you have more progress!

[Forinti]

A short description of your process would be great, timdream. Also, about how much space does the boot directory take up with this method? I'd love to add another, larger linux distro to my Dell Mini 9, and bounce booting from a small partition onto a SDHC this way would be great, since the bios can't see my memory card and I'm already pushing the space limit on the SSD.

[anfy]

i got it working after 3 days of painful trial-and-error.

basically, add the mmc_block, etc to the file listed, update the initramfs file (choose a diff location), the point grub to it. I will post a tutorial when I get time (hopefully soon), on the aspire one forum.

[Forinti]

i got it working after 3 days of painful trial-and-error.

Been there.
Just hit this thread with the link whenever you do get something written down. No rush though, it'll be a week before I can even try anything. Many thanks in advance!

[damoisture]

A little more guidance would be great, but I'm going to give this a shot this weekend anyway and see what I can do with it!

[james_w12345]

Please can someone post a tutorial of how to do this.
i have a vista(university supplied) laptop which id rather not install to, so im trying to use the sd card to boot ubuntu. i can install to sd card no problem, but dont know where to put the grub loader.

also apparently, this might be useful, my laptop has an option to boot from floppy/sd card, but as yet i havnt managed to get this to work.
any help/tutuorial would be very useful.

[ios77]

Here you can find a weel done guide. But following it I have a problem...
During the second installation on the esternal SD the grub installation on it failed. If I boot from the distro installed on the internal SSD and try to manually install grub on the external SD I have the same error. The device is correct but it doesn't appar as /dev/sdXX but /dev/mmxxxxxxx.
How can I solve?

[superJoel]

Here you can find a weel done guide. But following it I have a problem...
During the second installation on the esternal SD the grub installation on it failed. If I boot from the distro installed on the internal SSD and try to manually install grub on the external SD I have the same error. The device is correct but it doesn't appar as /dev/sdXX but /dev/mmxxxxxxx.
How can I solve?

using that guide at osnews didn't work at first, but it was an easy fix.

Follow the guide. After you finish installing your ubuntu version onto your SDHC card while in the SDHC USB adapter, reboot and run it that from the SDHC card in the USB Adapter. While started up edit the following file with gedit, nano, kate or whatever.

/etc/initramfs-tools/modules

Add these each on one line (do not comment with #):

mmc_core
mmc_block
sdhci
sdhci-pci

Save the modules file.

Now at the command line type:

sudo update-initramfs -u

to update the initramfs file on your SDHC card.

Copy your new initramfs file and your vmlinuz file from the SDHC's boot directory over to your SSD drive's /boot directory and finish up with the rest of his guide to edit your grub.

my grub for the SDHC portion looks like this:

title Ubuntu 8.10, 2.6.27-7-SDHC
uuid=62191336-8e39-45b6-91e9-28d022f3fe6d
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27-7-generic root=UUID=ec958856-dc52-4cf2-a36d-0a9f26b2a4df ro
clocksource=hpet
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.27-7-generic

the first uuid is my SSD not my SDHC card. The kernel is pointing the kernel file that I copied from the boot directory off the SDHC card onto the boot directory on my SSD and the uuid on the kernel line is for my SDHC card (you can get this by typing in blkid in terminal). If you get hangups due to clocksource you might want to add the clocksource=hpet line.

Hope this helps anyone trying to run dual boot off your SDHC card slot.

[flubbard]

I'm trying to do a similar thing with the Aspire One, with a couple of changes and I'm not making very much progress. I have a internal HD (non SSD), but would like to boot from the SD card slot. I would like to launch from a USB key, which I can then unmount and run with only the SD card. I believe that I have grub loaded on the USB card and I have it configured to use the UUID, but when I try to boot, I get a file not found. I believe that I have recreated the initram file with the SD modules loaded and I have put that on the USB card.

I would appreciate any thoughts from those that have been able to make it work. I've been at this for about a week with very little success.

Thanks - flub

[superJoel]

I'm trying to do a similar thing with the Aspire One, with a couple of changes and I'm not making very much progress. I have a internal HD (non SSD), but would like to boot from the SD card slot. I would like to launch from a USB key, which I can then unmount and run with only the SD card. I believe that I have grub loaded on the USB card and I have it configured to use the UUID, but when I try to boot, I get a file not found. I believe that I have recreated the initram file with the SD modules loaded and I have put that on the USB card.

I would appreciate any thoughts from those that have been able to make it work. I've been at this for about a week with very little success.

Thanks - flub

This should be possible. Did you install the system onto the SD card? You should be able to boot up from SD card while plugged into a USB card reader... if that works then did you add the lines mmc_core, mmc_block, sdhci, and sdhci-pci to your /etc/initramfs-tools/modules on the SD cards OS? Then you should have ran the update-initramfs -u and take that new initramfs file from the SD card and copy over to your USB's boot folder... you will need to ensure that the GRUB/menu.lst file shows your USB's uuid as the one on the second it will be booting from, and then on the kernel line use your SD card's uuid to have it start (your vmlinuz file probably should be on the usb as well as on your SD card)... what does your grub look like for what you are trying to accomplish?