Boot from an SD Memory Card

This is so cool that I'm just sitting here giggling about it. Many newer computers, with newer BIOS, are able to boot from a flash memory card. My HP 2133 systems can do that. So I just used the latest Ubuntu 9.04 Beta LiveCD, which has a "USB Startup Disk Creator" option, and created a bootable SD card!

Compared to booting the LiveCD from a USB CD/DVD drive, it is lightning fast. Wow. It only needs about 700 MB on the SD card, so a 1 GB card is more than enough. Even better, you can partition a larger card, copy the LiveCD image to the first partition, and use the other partition(s) for permanent storage. They get automounted when you boot.

The caveat, of course, is that a large majority of systems today can not do this, as they don't support booting from memory card slots. Neither of my Lifebook laptops will do it, for example. Also, it is fast compared to booting and running from a CD/DVD; compared to booting from a hard drive, the flash memory is still quite slow.

jw 1/4/2009