Arch Linux

WTFitsGeorge

Member

From: South Africa

Registered: 2018-11-15

Posts: 3

Website

Arch installation to SD-Card [SOLVED]

Good day.
I've been an Arch user for about five years and didn't feel the need to ask for assistance on the forum as the wiki is comprehensive enough for my needs. Until now that is. I have an extra laptop lying around in my office and decided to convert it to a home theatre box. I installed Arch on it and it works perfectly. To slim the install down further I'd like to remove the hard drive and run my installation directly from an SD card in the laptops' built-in SD card reader. This is where I hit a wall. The SD card is picked up as /dev/mmcblk0 and doesn't seem to be in /dev/sdx

Here is the lsblk output:

NAME    MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda       8:0    0 149.1G  0 disk 
|-sda1    8:1    0   100M  0 part /boot
`-sda2    8:2    0   149G  0 part /
mmcblk0 179:0    0  14.7G  0 disk 

I partitioned the sd card with gdisk (tried fdisk as well) with gdisk /dev/mmcblk0.
I made the EFI partition and the Linux partition, write it to disk. It says it was written successfully but I still cannot see the new partitions.

If I insert the sd card in another pc I can see the created partitions as it is picked up as sdc1 and sdc2.

This is the part where I'm stuck.

Last edited by WTFitsGeorge (2018-11-15 11:54:45)

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If you are reading this you have way too much time on your hands.

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: Arch installation to SD-Card [SOLVED]

Does your laptop actually support booting from the card reader? A lot of them don't.

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No, it didn't "fix" anything. It just shifted the brokeness one space to the right. - jasonwryan
Closing -- for deletion; Banning -- for muppetry. - jasonwryan

aur - dotfiles

WTFitsGeorge

Member

From: South Africa

Registered: 2018-11-15

Posts: 3

Website

Re: Arch installation to SD-Card [SOLVED]

Thanks for the fast reply. I should've checked it first before going on this whole quest. The SD card reader doesn't appear on the boot sequence in the UEFI/BIOS. So I guess I'm out of luck booting to SD.

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If you are reading this you have way too much time on your hands.

ua4000

Member

Registered: 2015-10-14

Posts: 492

Re: Arch installation to SD-Card [SOLVED]

If it's an older laptop, you should try MBR instead of efi/gpt partition.