Linux on an SD card on an X201 Tablet

[MisterB]

This has been an interesting experiment. I wanted to try Mint Linux in a Thinkpad but was lacking a spare drive to try it on. I noticed that my X201 had the SD card in the internal slot on the F12 boot menu so I decided to try to install it on an SD card. I had a couple of 32gb SDHC cards lying around so I put one in the SD slot, booted from a Mint Linux 17.2 64 bit DVD. I partitioned the the SD card with Gparted into one 8gb Ext4 system partition, one 5gb swap partition for 4gb of memory and the remaining space I made into a Fat32 partition. The installation went smoothly. I installed Grub on the SD cards boot sector and it booted with all the bootable Windows partitions on the menu in addition to the Linux partition. Disk speeds are better than on a USB drive but I haven't done any detailed benchmarking yet. The only thing that didn't work the way I wanted it to was on the Windows side. Windows 7 wouldn't see the Fat32 partition and saw the Ext4 partition as an unformatted disk. I booted from the Mint DVD, deleted the first install and repartitioned the disk with Fat32 partition as the first partition and the Ext4 partition as the second, seen by Gparted and the Mint installer as sdb. I booted to Windows again and saw that the Fat32 partition was visible and the Linux partitions were not seen by Windows explorer so I booted from the Mint DVD again and installed again.

This is kind of slick. I have Linux on what amounts to a really inexpensive SSD in addition to Windows 7 in both 32 and 64 bit system partitions on the main disk. Linux can see all the data on the main disk but the data on the Linux SD is invisible to Windows. On the Linux side, I have everything working from the base install except the tablet buttons. The digitizer works just as well as in Windows. I haven't done any custom driver installs yet.

Booting from an SD card only works on my X201. I tried it on my W510 and X61s but no go. Now I wonder what other Thinkpads can do this.

[jaspen-meyer]

I used to run a T41 with a CF card inserted into a pata adapter. Reduce disk writes and disk access with:

Code: Select all

~$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

add ',noatime' to your drives

Code: Select all

UUID=xxxxxxx /home           ext4    defaults,noatime        0       2

My T420s runs from a 4GB usb drive.

I don't know of a way for windows to see the Ext 4 partitions. On the linux side you likely don't need the swap partition.

[MisterB]

I used to run a T41 with a CF card inserted into a pata adapter. Reduce disk writes and disk access with:

Code: Select all

~$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

add ',noatime' to your drives

Code: Select all

UUID=xxxxxxx /home           ext4    defaults,noatime        0       2

My T420s runs from a 4GB usb drive.

I don't know of a way for windows to see the Ext 4 partitions. On the linux side you likely don't need the swap partition.

I use hibernation and the swap partition is needed for that. The noatime suggestion is good, I haven't even thought about tweaks and performance yet.

[axur-delmeria]

Booting from an SD card only works on my X201. I tried it on my W510 and X61s but no go. Now I wonder what other Thinkpads can do this.

Can you check the output of lspci and lsusb to determine if the card reader is USB or PCIe?

[MisterB]

Booting from an SD card only works on my X201. I tried it on my W510 and X61s but no go. Now I wonder what other Thinkpads can do this.

Can you check the output of lspci and lsusb to determine if the card reader is USB or PCIe?

It is identified in the boot menu as a USB device. It is a lot faster than a Lexar Expresscard drive I have been using as a bootable drive but that is probably due to the speed of the card, not that of the reader.

[axur-delmeria]

It is identified in the boot menu as a USB device.

So that's why it's bootable-- the USB boot function in the BIOS handles it.

The card reader in the X61 is PCI or PCIe-based, which means it needs its own boot routine/ROM/firmware.
Unfortunately, I don't think such firmware even exists.

It's just like the case of PCIe/Expresscard SATA controllers which aren't bootable because they don't have the boot ROM (except for some Macs which have a generic AHCI boot ROM).