How to boot HPnc8430 laptop from SD card?

[daarek5]

Hi,
I know it's old topic...
but time passed ... any luck booting from SDcard in laptop internal bay?
My laptop is HPnc8430, card working as mnt/mmcblk0p1 but not as boot device.
Battle is lost? due bios/hardware limits?

[Semme]

daarek5,

Perhaps you can apply a few of the ideas discussed in these two threads.

The former references your mmcblk0p1 device.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 443#615443

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 374#361374

[enrique]

....Battle is lost? due bios/hardware limits?

No, Not necessary. Listen what you need to have is persistence. There are many users here that are willing to help you.

There is a very low chance that you may be correct. Some manufacturing limitation. But most of the time that is not the case. And in worst case we only need to build you a driver/initrd or a new kernel.

Now it requires time from your side and willingness to do the "techy stuff". Yes some terminal writing and posting results here for us to help.

So if you really want help Open a New thread. Post as much info of your machine and problem.

enrique

[bigpup]

Turn on or restart the computer. Press f10 just as it starts to boot.
This should open the bios setup.
Advanced menu->Boot Order
If the internal SD card is listed as a device to choose.
Should be able to put a boot-able OS on it.

[daarek5]

Thanks for quick reply.
My idea was internal SD card as a only boot device.

Turn on or restart the computer. Press f10 just as it starts to boot.
This should open the bios setup.
Advanced menu->Boot Order
If the internal SD card is listed as a device to choose.
Should be able to put a boot-able OS on it.

I have tried
No luck
internal SD card is not listed as a device to choose there

[enrique]

Soo fast!

"Don’t underestimate the Force." – Darth Vader
"Close your eyes. Feel it. The light…it’s always been there. It will guide you." – Maz Kanata
"Si no hay pan..... galletas" - El jibaro Boricua

See all those masters never gave up.

"internal SD card"
Are you talking about SD Card Reader? or CardBus , Smart Card

* Never told me what is with the HDD. It does not have to work. We only need track 0

* If you are willing to have a permanent CD inside, this can allow to boot SDCARD

*Do you have at home another PC that can serve like a server? An old rooted Android, PXE booting?

*See an interesting quote

if I leave the card in the memory slot, Vista won't boot. It just sits in the loading screen until I remove the card. Weird.

*PCMCIA - some have flash memory that are hackable. This is old stuff that may not be easy to find.

And if you pay me 1 or 2 beers I can talk all night....

enrique

[cthisbear]

Specs:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-HP ... 664.0.html

user manual:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02616844.pdf

Maybe do this....with SD card instead.

Power up the Nc8430 with the USB connected, press F9 as soon as you see the HP logo.
Choose the USB and press enter.

Chris.

[daarek5]

MicroSD card in usb reader works.
Maybe we should change topic for less specyfic. Which laptop boots with internal card reader which not?
Which boot only by dark side...hmm

[enrique]

This is a weird thread ...
* I come from the impression this thread at the top had a few very old post, I suspect deleted. That why I ask to open a new thread. Lets ignore this.

* Lets start by saying, The smart answer is buy a new USB Memory. You can get one for less that $5 US and even for a $1 from china and save a lot of trouble.

* In a funny way I was really doing my best to provide booting options to resolve a puppy user problem. But now I am under the impression OP daarek5 is not seeking for help. So lets dance by the music been played.

...Maybe we should change topic for less specyfic. Which laptop boots with internal card reader which not?...

Personally do not have knowledge of any Laptop It is been said that Netbook ( Laptop class) build from 2007-2014 that came without HDD may have such capabilities. And possible some ARM base as this in fact boot already from soldered to main board mmcblock devices as default . Then there are some Arm Chromebooks, So their BIOS, OS Kernel and Hardware had all the modifications to boot from mmcblock.

Ignoring laptop, then there are Androids base boxes, develoment protoboards like rasbery-pi. Then the Mini PC, Micro PC and Compute Sticks many of witch boot from mmcblock devices.

...Which boot only by dark side...hmm...

Ignoring USB, then your best option is Boot from CD, then pass controll to Puppy located at mmcblock in card reader. There is a thread some where here that I show how something like

Code: Select all

title Puppy upupbb 18.05 (sdb2/LxPupBionic-18.05-mod)
 find --set-root uuid () 01D25BB9765C3F00
 kernel /LxPupBionic-18.05-mod/vmlinuz  
 pmedia=atahd 
 pdrv=01D25BB9765C3F00
 psubdir=/LxPupBionic-18.05-mod
 psave=5697-E053:/LxPupBionic-18.05-mod/upupbbsave-Test.4fs
 pupsfs=5697-E053:/LxPupBionic-18.05-mod/puppy_upupbb_18.05.sfs
 adrv=5697-E053:/LxPupBionic-18.05-mod/adrv_upupbb_18.05.sfs
 fdrv=5697-E053:/LxPupBionic-18.05-mod/fdrv_upupbb_18.05.sfs
 ydrv=5697-E053:/LxPupBionic-18.05-mod/ydrv_upupbb_18.05.sfs
 zdrv=5697-E053:/LxPupBionic-18.05-mod/zdrv_upupbb_18.05.sfs
 initrd /LxPupBionic-18.05-mod/initrd.gz

*See in this sample grub4dos search and start boot process on disk with UUID=01D25BB9765C3F00
*vmlinuz & initrd are loaded from 01D25BB9765C3F00
*But Puppy OS is intructed to load from diferent disk, this will be /dev/mmcblock0p1 with UUUD=5697-E053.
*As results all Puppy OS files are loaded from /dev/mmcblock0p1.

To be clear again, please ignore or the possible options I proposed. All those where given to prove my point; that you can boot even with a broken HDD. But be smart buy your self a $1 usb memory and save your time and a headache. Unless you want to have fun and learn the other options.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle/Sherlock Holmes/Spock

[wiak]

My own laptop is an old (around 2008) HP Elitebook 2530p. Actually I have three of these - two came without any internal hard drive (had been removed). My kids use these and they previously were booted via SD card plugged into SD card slot. We used Porteus boot BionicDog64 on them, which, distro-wise at least is know to be able to be booted from SD device. Make sure when you set up your SD card (e.g. in GParted) you have activated the boot 'flag' for it or it won't boot.

Certainly, if the machine can boot instead from usb, you can put the SD card in a usb converter, but no point in that since you could simply use a usb stick... and also SD card booting is nice since it doesn't stick out from the side of the machine.

I should say that in these HP Elitebook 2530p machines, when you press ESC key you can enter the BIOS setup, and in Boot Options there is in fact an option to enable SD boot, so clearly these particular machines can be booted from SD card (BIOS supported). You should check the BIOS on your own machine to see what Boot options are offered - being similar age to the HP Elitebook I mention, I would suspect your machine can boot from bootable SD card in its slot.

Also on the HP Elitebook 2530P after pressing ESC key at boot time, another option is to press function key F9 for boot options. Then I see SD card as one of the devices that can be booted from (but ONLY if there is a 'boot flag set' bootable SD card already inserted in the SD slot).

Hope that information helps. Being able to boot from SD is a real benefit in a machine that has no harddrive - far better than booting from a usb flash drive in my opinion (especially if slow usb 2 ports, though I'm not sure SD is actually any faster - depends what bus interface it uses I suppose and on the SD card speed too maybe).

wiak

[daarek5]

Being able to boot from SD is a real benefit in a machine that has no harddrive - far better than booting from a usb flash drive in my opinion (especially if slow usb 2 ports...
wiak

That is my idea , maybe hard to explain due my bad english.
In this laptop are 3 ports so all will be occupied by mouse, usb modem and boot pendrive.
Of course other options (boot CD+ presistance SD) are worth try to keep this alive. Thanks

My own laptop is an old (around 2008) HP Elitebook 2530p. Actually I have three of these - two came without any internal hard drive (had been removed). My kids use these and they previously were booted via SD card plugged into SD card slot. We used Porteus boot BionicDog64 on them, which, distro-wise at least is know to be able to be booted from SD device. Make sure when you set up your SD card (e.g. in GParted) you have activated the boot 'flag' for it or it won't boot.
wiak

So some laptops can do this...
SD card were prepared by Puppy internal installer, and bootable.
I don't see Boot options for SD card in its slot in my machine.
wiak could you check if /dev/mmcblock0p1 is SD bootable in your HP Elitebook 2530p?

[enrique]

...maybe hard to explain due my bad english...

What is your native language? We have Spanish, German & French sections. In any case if you get you need to. write 1rst on native language, then post below you translation. I know Spanish too.

...In this laptop are 3 ports so all will be occupied by mouse, usb modem and boot pendrive...

Option 1
That situation was preaty much the same for what I build the "title Puppy upupbb 18.05 (sdb2/LxPupBionic-18.05-mod)".

Listen. You have 2 USB can not used (mouse, usb modem). So in practice you have 1 usb free. Then my suggestion is use this free usb to boot Grub4dos and Kernel. Then as explained before ALL process is moved to SDCARD (/dev/mmvblk0p1). A soon as you see Puppy you can SAFELY remove USB Memory to free that USB. As ALL your Puppy system files and PuppySave will be at SDCARD.


Option 2 CD
Possibly this will work as default.
Read more at to https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/index.html
I used this method to boot from USB where the PC has no USB Boot option and the PC have broken HDD.

Never used it for SDCARD. But I am pretty sure it will do. I will be testing this at home, let you know.

[wiak]

I don't see Boot options for SD card in its slot in my machine.
wiak could you check if /dev/mmcblock0p1 is SD bootable in your HP Elitebook 2530p?

I can confirm that /dev/mmcblk0p1 is the device the machine boots from. If you have boot flag set on your device and you are sure the install is correct and otherwise bootable on it, but don't see it in the possible boot list, then it may indeed simply be that your machine is not able to boot from SD. The HP Elitebook 2530p laptop certainly is though and it is from /dev/mmcblk01p.

I don't use Puppy Linux now, so can't check for that distro, however if your machine cannot boot from SD card, it may well be an alterative reasonable option to boot from usb flash stick but make your save folder onto the SD card. If Puppy allows that, there is no reason you could not have a distro booting into RAM and then using SD card for save persistence, or indeed simply have grub4dos on usb stick, and have that then boot main puppy install from the SD card itself as enrique suggests (the grub4dos on usb idea should certainly work even if you can't boot directly from SD). Even on my harddrive machine, which has the grub4dos and menu.lst on it, I often boot other distros that I have frugal installed onto usb or SD card in practice.

wiak

[bigpup]

daarek5 wrote:
I don't see Boot options for SD card in its slot in my machine.

If you are talking about a external SD card slot on the side of the laptop.

Two things to try:
Make sure the SD card has the boot flag set for the partition on it.
Partition it with one partition, formatted fat32, and flagged boot.

Some computers have a bios that has to detect the boot flag on a drive and see it as a fat32 format.

Also, when you look at the boot devices list in the bios boot device selection.
It could actually be identified as a generic USB drive.

My laptop sees a SD card in the SD card slot as a generic USB drive.

[d4p]

It will boot using Plopkexec

[enrique]

Uhmm!
As I said I did a quick test on plob. Turn out plob only has 50% chance.

Or only work if you CardReader is USB type. See normally Card Readers come in two flavors, USB Controller or PCI Controller. You can find by doing:

Code: Select all

lsmod | grep -e 'sdhc\|mmc'

See mine show rtsx_pci I can see easily is PCI.

So

Code: Select all

lspci | grep -i -e 'reader\|reader'
13:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5209 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)

If yours is USB you can try

Code: Select all

lsusb -t

and try to match the driver module given with lsmod.

Now As mine is PCI. my MMC will never show as a USB boot device!!!. So plob will be of no help.

In any case best option is to have HDD, USB or CD to boot at least the kernel then transfer to SDCARD/mmnblk. You can use your choice of grub4dos.legacy or grub2.

I need to make a comment. The posted grb4dos sample was obtain by reading the init inside initrd. It is all part of woofce. Nothing is new. All thanks to the Authors of Puppy init as they thought on all this scenarios.

[daarek5]

Thanks wiak so ellite can boot plebs cant
realy wired idea came to my mind again
some time ago I had huawei156 umts modem with 0cd (win drivers) and microSd slot. AFIK 0cd storage can be changed but never tried.
make it bootable, presistance microSd and of course modem would be relly nice.
Sadly I sold it.