Boot from SD card Reader?

sygnus21 · 25 Oct 2014

whs said:

It is possible but it is a dog. The card reader is a USB2 device and sloooow by nature. If it runs, it will run like molasses. Best external option is to run from a fast USB3 stick or a SSD attached bia USB3 or eSata. That I do all the time for Windows and Linux and there is a very small performance penalty..

Thanks Wolfgang. That's good info to know :)

whs · 27 Oct 2014

You are welcome. Here are a couple of tutorials I made for installation on a stick and external SSD (fast external HDD is possible but slower).

Install Windows on a stick - or external disk

Install Linux on a stick - very fancy

AddRAM · 27 Oct 2014

I made a 32 bit and a 64 bit out of 2 sd cards a long time ago, just tried one on this Gateway I set up for Windows 10, worked perfectlly. :)

But it does not show up in the bios of the HP 6300.

sygnus21 · 27 Oct 2014

Thanks for all the inputs. I linked this thread to the thread over at DP Review for quick reference should anyone have any further questions.

I'm glad I posted this question, as I didn't think it was possible. You learn something everyday.

Peace

jimbo45 · 28 Oct 2014

AddRAM said:

I made a 32 bit and a 64 bit out of 2 sd cards a long time ago, just tried one on this Gateway I set up for Windows 10, worked perfectlly. :)

But it does not show up in the bios of the HP 6300.

Hi there

Link please.

Also if it didn't show up in the BIOS what did the ORIGINAL bootstrap loader -- was this off the HDD, a USB drive or whatever.

If you REALLY did this - it should work WITH NO OTHER HDD'S or devices connected to the system -- remove the laptops HDD and any other devices and then try again.

(The bootstrap loader is usually started from the Bios to read the ist instruction (ONE instruction) into the machine and then execute it. This then executes a piece of code to read a block of code which starts the computer boot process. This second piece of code now reads the rest of the start up process. To perform a boot you need the HARDWARE bootstrap instruction and the block of code which reads the rest of the start up process in (two instructions - which is called "bootstrapping" -- computers 101 !!).

If the bootstrap loader can't read the SD card -- no BOOT -- the BIOS / hardware can only read data from devices it sees when the boot loader is started. !!!

Cheers
jimbo

AddRAM · 28 Oct 2014

Link to what ?

badrobot · 28 Oct 2014

If you guys are trying to make this work to have a portable OS that you can carry around, it won't work like that. It will only work on a machine it was installed from (if it even work).

AddRAM · 28 Oct 2014

Your 1st statement is true, but I made them on another machine, and it worked fine on this Gateway. Mind you I didn`t fully install Windows, I just tested the SD card because of this thread

They`ve been sitting in a drawer for a year or 2 now. (32 and 64 bit Windows 7 installers)

badrobot · 28 Oct 2014

Yes the OS will load up on another PC but it will be deactivated and erratic due to hardware issues. You can boot it up but you can't use it properly.

jimbo45 · 29 Oct 2014

Hi there

Windows to Go will install properly and run from an external device even with NO HDD's in the host computer so it IS possible to load and run Windows in some instances from an external device. Linux of course has no issues with being bootable and runnable from external devices.

(The windows to go - create from the Enterprise version of W8 / W10) will load and run on different computers - however it *might* require re-activation if the hardware is considerably different -- however it DOES seem to be reasonably tolerant of different hardware).

Now IF the computer recognizes say an EXTERNAL card reader as a USB device then the computer *Might* boot from the sd card.

However I can't see any way the computer could boot from an INTERNAL SD card if the device wasn't recognized by the BIOS at boot time since where would the 2nd instruction in the bootstrap read the block of code from to load up the start up sequence to begin to load the OS and start running.

The process is explained here.

Booting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cheers
jimbo