Frugal install to SD of Asus eee

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Frugal install to SD of Asus eee
started by: adssse

Posted by adssse on Aug. 13 2008,01:06

I recently purchased an Asus Eee and have been attempting to do a frugal install of dsl 4.2.5 onto a 4gb SD card which I will keep in the SD slot to boot from. I would like to keep Xandros on the SSD for now and by selecting Esc when booting I can choose to boot from the SD card. I setup two partitions (sda1 75mb, bootable for image) (sda2 for mydsl) and following the instructions from
< http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/f/topic-3-26-8732-0.html >

It seems to set up fine, but when rebooting and choosing my SD card to boot from I am encountered with only blinking cursor. My menu.lst looks as I would expect it to with root=/dev/sda1 with sda2 for mydsl and such. Due I need to have grub installed to sda for some reason? I would really like to get this to work, but do not have a great understanding of this. Any help would be appreciated.

Posted by curaga on Aug. 13 2008,12:17

Yes, your boot device needs to have a bootloader installed, the bios only chainloads it. If you followed that post, isn't grub already there?

Posted by adssse on Aug. 14 2008,00:56

Yes, grub is installed on sda1 which is the first partition on my SD card. So when booting I choose to boot from my SD card as opposed to the SSD with Xandros on it. Unfortunately it seems as though it is not finding grub as I am not presented with any options, just a cursor. Not sure why it is not picking it up.

Posted by curaga on Aug. 14 2008,13:54

Can you boot the SD card in Qemu? (qemu -hda /dev/sda)

Posted by adssse on Aug. 19 2008,22:58

Sorry, I have been away on vacation...

This may be a stupid question, but how do I use qemu? I tried booting with the live cd and entering this command. I also tried this from within Xandros, but I just get command not found.

Posted by curaga on Aug. 20 2008,12:09

You'd need to install it from your distro's package manager, or download it from it's home page:
< http://bellard.org/qemu/download.html >