Boot from SD card?

[robot999]

I have a X61 thinkpad. I want to know is there any way to boot from a SDHC card?
If not, will LENOVO plan to update the bios to support this function?

[monkey_boy]

booting from sd card is never heard of and is something that is really complex to do because the system has to be fully functional (meaning the OS has to be constantly running) to make the sd card being able to read. if lenovo does try to create a bootable bios that can support SD cards, then "more power to them" as of right now, there are many laptop elsewhere with bios that does not even support USB external drive to boot the system. hope this helps.

[robot999]

It might be difficult, but the eeePC from ASUS can boot from such a device.
SD cards nowadays are large enough to support installing a OS in it. If such a boot function come true, we can use a cheap SD card as SSD instead of those expensive ones in the market.

[teetee]

The fastest sdhc card (class 6) has speed limit of 6mb/sec.  It's not much help for the boot speed if one would want it to be a system disk. 

Comparison:
SSD alternative: 266x~300x CF (~35MB/sec at best)
4200rpm hard drive (~22MB/sec)
Both of them were tested under HDTach through IDE connection.

That's probably why we can get a 16GB SDHC for $60 while a 8GB 266x CF card is still above $100.

[vkyr]

Here is a related reference to a Microsoft article called "Recommendations for Booting Windows from USB Storage Devices" which names the preconditions (for the mainboard BIOS etc.)...

--> http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx

...which have to be fulfilled. But actual Windows-versions are not very optimized for booting from external devices, even it would be technically possible, as can be seen for most Linux derivates with the right kernel drivers. - However, booting from SD-cards should be quite more difficult, at least for a windows based system.

[Snife]

Its simply not possible to boot from the SD card plus, as mentioned by others, it would be pointless anyway as SD memory is nowhere near as capable as an SSD.

[twinotter]

Wow.  I'm surprised at the authority of these responses.

It is possible to boot from SD, generally.  The venerable Toshiba m200 has been able to boot from SD since it was introduced.  It boots from a disk image that is downloaded to the SD card and is presumably uploaded into RAM.  It's the best way to upgrade its bios.

Unfortunately, though, I don't know of Lenovo support for doing this same thing.  I have created multi-boot USB sticks (I have a 256M that boots linux, windows (PE) and dos).  Look around for howtos on USB sticks.  There might be something on SD... Alternatively, you could possibly use a USB stick to boot an image from the SD card... That may not be ideal, but there are some very tiny USB sticks that barely stick out of the slot at all now...

Good luck!

to

[mattmetzger]

I know this is an older thread, but I'm surprised no one pointed out the usefulness of being able to load an OS off of an SD card.  I'm currently on vacation, and I borked the install of Ubuntu on my x41, and I have no USB drive or my external CD drive. I can use a different computer to download Ubuntu and use unetbootin to get an SD card ready to load up...... but the x41 can't boot to SD cards.... 

[bolster]

Was just about to start a new thread when i read this. I take it noone has solved this yet? Great... a 'feature'...

[indie]

The BIOS on these don't support directly booting from an SD card as it's connected via the PCIe bus, if you've got can external USB SD card reader then it should be fine. I wouldn't ever count on Lenovo providing support for this (Re Fn key BIOS fix). You can however boot strap the internal SD card reader from a media that is already bootable - HD/USB stick. I'm not sure about windows as that's a different beast but Linux will work fine. The key is to modify initrd to include the modules for the SD card reader.

For example, add grub4dos as an option to C:\boot.ini and create a C:\menu.lst file. Copy the kernel and modified initrd to the windows C:\ drive. You'll then be able to boot into Linux from the SD card. The drive will appear as /dev/mmcblk?p? instead of /dev/sd?. This post has some useful information about which modules to include. You could of course do the same with syslinux on a USB stick.. You can then remove it once it's booted but then you can get around the stick protruding problem by using the copy2ram option... Grub can't access the the SD car reader as it doesn't have a driver for it and the BIOS doesn't provide support.

-Indie