Booting from an sd card

Posted 2nd Mar 2023

Hello everyone, I want to use an sd card on a Windows laptop to allow me to boot into Linux. This is an alternative to nano flash drives which keep failing. Can someone recommend a resilient sd card please. I need it to be transferable to other machines, so I'm not going to install on the internal drive. Thanks awfully.

9 Comments

sorted by

C0mm0d0re_K1d
3rd Mar
You need a storage device marked as high endurance, extreme or industrial flash. Any other type of usb stick or sd card will fail quite quickly. When put under such intensive continued writes, when used to run an OS. Standard flash works better when only changed occasionally and read lots. You can easily get high endurance usb flash drives, micro sd, compact flash or you could use an external nvme ssd.

Your probably better looking at a usb flash/nvme drive or usb memory card adapter. As others have said. Not all laptops support booting from the sd, depending on how old the system is.

As for usb things getting knocked, whilst plugged in. You can use a short usb male to female extension cable.
ZVO4Freedom
14th May
this. these cards are not to 1000's of writes that an OS will do in a day. this is even more punishing than a dash cam.
tardytortoise
2nd Mar
adam.mt is right - not every laptop supports booting from SD card so even if your laptop supports it you could not rely on other laptops being able to boot from it.
is there a reason why you cannot use a usb stick?
radium Author
2nd Mar
The bigger ones get knocked when moving the laptop around and the smaller one's just fail. A few days ago a sandisk one went into read only state and there doesn't seem to be a way of fixing it. The usual route, diskpart or regedit don't work.
TristanDeCoonha
2nd Mar
Ubuntu recommends installing to a usb if you don't want it permanent.
My understanding is that microsd are designed for flash and burn (example photo) rather than continuous use
adam.mt
2nd Mar
Depends on your laptop. Plug one in, go into the BIOS' boot manager, and see if the device shows.
joedastudd
2nd Mar
Have you checked the distro your using is optimised to be ran off flash storage?
The original raspberry pi distro would burn though SDs pretty quick until it was optimised for sd boot drives.
radium Author
2nd Mar
I'm using bodhi Linux, it's very light. It runs off flash drives fine but I've been using the small nano flash drives, which I think are the problem. I want the drive to be discrete that's why I'm considering sd cards.