[lubuntu-users] Boot from SD card? Why not?

Basil Fernie basil at pop.co.za
Sun Jun 5 05:16:36 UTC 2016


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is it just an outdated unimaginative BIOS chip on the Samsung which 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








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