Booting Netbook with a SD Card

Booting Netbook with a SD Card

I was lucky to find a Netbook with reasonable RAM with hard disk more than 100 GiB.

It also had SuSe enterprise edition to make a good buy in Sri-Lanka.

There was no buyer for it until I discovered it in a shop in Kandy.

Dealer was not a computer expert but a good salesman.

I could negotiate a good price having convinced him nobody will buy it (except perhaps me) with Linux as an operating system and if he has to install Microsoft there will be additional cost for him.

He won’t be able to boot it from a Flashdrive and he needs a USB DVD ROM to boot Microsoft.

That was some additional expense for the buyer.

Then I came home since I did not have spare cash (they stopped the salary for 3 months) because of the strike action.

Three months was a long time and I negotiated a loan from the bank and bought it, a week after initial negotiation.

Having bought tit I left it without using it since SuSe 10 was very old for me with OpenOffice instead of Libre Office.

In addition I could not get any additional software without registering with Novel (just like one register with Microsoft).

this was annoying for me to say the least.

I did not won’t a somewhat Virtual Guy taking control of my Linux Freedom.

Equally I did not want to lose warranty.

Then I realized only a few of the Linux distribution were compatible with Netbooks.

Finally I found Pinguy with all the software (11 series of Pinguy-Ubuntu derivative) including gParted and UnetBootIn and even Ubuntu One.

So one day I eased everything and booted and installed Pinguy.

I of course tried resizing the partition to get some space for Pinguy but it did not boot SuSe afterward..

In any case the partitioning done by the foreign vendor was horrible and did not have any understanding of Linux I believe.

That is the long story and the little story is how i booted it with a SDHC Memory Card.

Again I had to delay this due monetary reason.

Two days after we suspended the strike action I was in full swing and saw a 16 GiB SDHC Card and bought it using my credit card.

Methods and Materials.

1. Netbook

2. Linux image written on a DVD (Pinguy in this case).

3. Couple of Flashdrives.

4. USB Hard drive.

5. SD or SDHC

6. DVD RW Writer, optional.

7. Laptop for getting things ready with a DVD.

8. If not a Desktop. In my case the downloading was done with the desktop and all the Linux images were copied subsequently to the USB Hard disk.

STEPS.

1. Install Pinguy.

2. Using Pinguy prepare either USB Flash Drive (UnietBootIn) or USB hard drive as spare Live systems(Using Live DVD).

3. Boot Pinguy with SDHC card in slot.

4. Use gParted to partition SDHC Card.

5. First partition has to be FAT32 (in my case 4 GB FAT 32,  4 GiB NTFS and 8 GiB Ext4)

6. Run UnetBootIn and I gave the path to where my Linux Pinguy image was (in the USB Hard Disk). Be careful of the nomenclature of the disk names (HDD 1 Sda2, Sda 3 etc) and where it should be installed (in this case SDHC Card).

in about one has a bootable SD Card.

7. Boot it to see whether the installation is right.

8. Follow the same procedure for Flashdrives and test to see whether they work and remove them and place them in a safe place (Use them in case your original system breaks down. It rarely happens with Linux though and in my case never but when accidentally I format partitions with an operating system, I fall, back to the live CD/DVD.

Now it is Flashdrives and SD Cards both of which are environmentally sound as compared to CD/DVDs which are not.

Good luck if you are trying my experiments to get a hang of Linux.