Booting to SD

I've got a new Aspite One with 16GB SSD drive, there is no SD in the expansion slot so assume the 16GB is onboard.

The BIOS shows 2 IDE options for booting although only one has any details shown, the second only shows IDE1 with no device details.

If I put an SD card into the expansion slot the machine attaches it to the main drive so am wondering what the second IDE drive is as I am looking to run an alternative distro from an SD card if possible or a USB key.

Geffers

 

You cannot boot directly from the card readers since the BIOS is not aware of them, which is a great shame. Next best thing would be a bootloader, kernel and initrd image in a small partition on your current SSD/HD that loads the SD card drivers, mounts the root partition from the SD card and then does a chroot.

You can boot certain OS from a USB drive and there are many Live USB distros available, or utilities to convert a distro to a Live USB.

 

That is no longer true. I just got an AA1 D150-1920 and I used the USB-Live Mandriva 2009.1 Spring to install Mandriva to an 8Gb class 6 SDHC while it was in the SD card reader (which showed up as sbc) and had Grub installed on sbc. When I rebooted I noticed I did not have the F12 boot selection option. After enabling F12 boot selection and rebooted it showed the SDHC card as a USB boot device that booted into Grub giving me the option to boot into XP or Mandriva. Note: if the SDHC card is not in the slot I went directly into XP until I installed Mandriva then it also had the Grub boot option. The trouble is I can't test it on another machine since this is the only machine I know of that will boot from an SDHC card.

 

That's interesting, I've got a grub multiboot on my desktop so may look in to that.

Geffers

 

So what is the second IDE drive that the bios refers to.

Geffers

 

The BIOS enables 2 IDE channels in the ICH7 chipset. Unfortunately only one channel is physically connected to a storage device (ZIF PATA SSD in the A110 or SATA HDD in IDE emulation mode in the A150).

 

That's a useful feature on the D150. Unfortunately the OP seems to have an A110 or A150.

 

Guessed that might have been it.

Geffers

 

I have an AOA 110 AB. I would like to boot Win XP from an SDHC card. From a fair bit of reading around, this isn't possible, although I have seen some suggestion that BIOS version 3310 does support it, which isn't listed on the Acer FTP site! Any confirmation of im/possibility appreciated, especially with a relevant BIOS version (currently the BIOS doesn't see an SDHC card inserted into either slot).

If it is the case that it's impossible to boot from the SDHC card, I'm guessing that dual booting will be my best bet. I don't have a use for a linux installation, but if that's the only way (using grub) to get XP to successfully boot from the SDHC card, I'll go do that road. Having spent many fruitless hours fighting linux in the past, I'm hoping that someone can point me to a quick/easy linux install on the One that will include a bootloader so that I can then run XP from the SDHC card. Pretty please?

 

You are going to find that running XP from an SDHC card is much slower than from a hard drive, with that said you will want one of the fastest SDHC cards you can find and a 16 Gb card will probably be about $100.00.

 

netbook i have has an SSHD, which i read are fast to read, very slow to write, and that XP is a dog on such a drive. hence the idea of running it from the SD card. but are you saying it is possible to boot from the SD card, if so, which BIOS version is capable of this?