Arch Linux

walterjwhite

Member

Registered: 2011-05-01

Posts: 207

booting from USB to SD card [solved]

Hi all,

I am trying to boot up to a root squashfs image on an SD card.  My BIOS does not support booting to an SD card directly, so I have a USB thumbdrive with the kernel, initramfs, and syslinux installed.  After it starts booting, I get errors:

Unable to read fragment cache entry ...
Unable to read page, block ...

Now, I can boot perfectly fine on other machines, I am thinking there is something wrong with the SD card reader?  Am I out of luck on this one or is there something else I can try?

Thanks,

Walter

Last edited by walterjwhite (2013-01-05 06:51:26)

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: booting from USB to SD card [solved]

Are you sure that the modules necessary for the sdcard reader is present in the initramfs?  Maybe you should try the fallback initramfs instead, as it does not employ the "autodetect" hook, so there are all kinds of modules in that one.

walterjwhite

Member

Registered: 2011-05-01

Posts: 207

Re: booting from USB to SD card [solved]

Hi WonderWoofy,

I think I tried that, but I'll give it a whirl and report back.

Thanks for the help.

Walter

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,500

Website

Re: booting from USB to SD card [solved]

Be sure to try/check both suggestions.  Testing the fallback is easy, so that's where I'd start too, but it's possible the needed module also isn't in the fallback image and needs to be explicitly added to mkinitcpio.conf.

---

"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

benine

Member

Registered: 2012-12-29

Posts: 9

Re: booting from USB to SD card [solved]

Have you tried booting on other machines using the SD card reader?

walterjwhite

Member

Registered: 2011-05-01

Posts: 207

Re: booting from USB to SD card [solved]

Yes, I am sorry if I wasn't clear.  I can boot the same image (same SD card) on other machines just fine.  I never used the SD card reader on the problematic laptop before because I used compact flash for pictures, so I don't know if it ever worked or not.  My fallback image didn't work, but it appears it did not have crypt support in it.  I'll post back my updates when I get a chance to add that in.

benine

Member

Registered: 2012-12-29

Posts: 9

Re: booting from USB to SD card [solved]

The way I understand it is that you can boot from the SD card on other machines but your laptop's BIOS doesn't support booting from SD cards so you've turned to using the USB SD card reader on the laptop. What I'd like to know is whether you have tried booting using the SD card reader on other machines or were you booting directly from the SD card. You said you thought it was SD card reader at fault but haven't been very explicit in all of the ways you've tested this theory.

walterjwhite

Member

Registered: 2011-05-01

Posts: 207

Re: booting from USB to SD card [solved]

Hi all,

I figured out the problem.  While I can't say exactly what the problem was (which module(s) was/were the problem), I will say that when I built a custom kernel for my laptop, the problem went away.  It boots perfectly now.

Walter