Booting from SD card using GRUB on hard drive

**argie** · November 18th, 2008

I have a Dell XPS M1330 which has an SD card which is seen by Ubuntu properly. All is well. Except for one thing. This laptop cannot boot off the SD card. What I plan to do to work around this is:

1. Boot a kernel with SD card drivers from the hard drive.
2. Use that to boot up from the card reader.

Is this possible? Can anyone who knows assist?

**freqhack** · December 6th, 2008

Have you had any luck with this yet? I'm trying to figure out how to do the same thing.

**caljohnsmith** · December 6th, 2008

Originally Posted by freqhack

Have you had any luck with this yet? I'm trying to figure out how to do the same thing.

If you want, I can help you do that, but how about first posting:

Code:

sudo fdisk -lu

And please identify all your partitions, including the partition on the HDD where you plan on putting the boot files.

**argie** · December 11th, 2008

Never did get this working. But would be happy to try now.

Code:

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1              63      160649       80293+  de  Dell Utility
/dev/sda2          161792    21133311    10485760    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3        21141540   240155684   109507072+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda4   *   240155685   312576704    36210510    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5       240155748   273040739    16442496   83  Linux
/dev/sda6       273040803   311259374    19109286   83  Linux
/dev/sda7       311259438   312576704      658633+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

From the top that is:
Dell Utility Partition
Dell Restore Partition
C: on Vista
Extended Partition (Booted with MediaDirect)
/ on Ubuntu (grub files rest in /boot/ here)
/home on Ubuntu
swap

I have it currently set up so that hitting the MediaDirect button boots GRUB and lists the Ubuntu options.

Is it possible to add this feature with losing any functionality?

**caljohnsmith** · December 11th, 2008

Do you know if your BIOS recognizes your SD card on start up? How about first plugging in your SD card, reboot, and when you get the Grub menu on start up, press "c" to go to the command line, and do:

Code:

grub> geometry (hd0)
grub> geometry (hd1)

Each of those commands will report the size and partitions of BIOS drives (hd0) and (hd1). Most likely (hd0) will be your internal sda drive. So use the output of the above commands to deduce if either (hd0) or (hd1) is your SD card, and let me know, because that might greatly simplify fixing your SD card booting problem.

**argie** · December 15th, 2008

Hi, I'm sorry I took so long to reply.

The first one lists my partitions on the drive inside. The second one gives me an error saying that the device couldn't be found.