TI Bootable SD Card

'm getting an Advent 4211 to use as a compact laptop for general use.

The absence of a CD drive is potentially limiting but not insurmountable for my needs.

I've seen reference to using the integral SD to create a backup of the Restoration Partition, which I believe Advent recommend, and I've seen the option to boot from SD on the Laptop.

I believe the only option offered on booting with this Laptop apart from the HD is the SD.

On a PC I rarely ever use a bootable CD and instead install Acronis True Image and use Startup Recovery Manager - F11.

I don't want to partition the HD.
In the event of warranty issues I want to keep the set up as close to original as possible.

I've read the excellent guide to creating a bootable USB drive containing Rescue Media.

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/suppo...ble_usb_hd.pdf

On the Advent I anticipated installing TI to create images and relying on booting into TI for restoration.
I was hoping therefore to create an Acronis bootable SD and on booting from the SD card, TI would run and allow selection of an image from an external USB HD or USB Pen Drive.

Reading the guide I have a strong suspicion it's not that simple.

If what I am hoping to do is not possible is it likely that I can follow the guide and substitute the SD card for the USB flash drive.

In that event will the MBR on the integral HD be overwritten.

The laptop will come with XP home and I have Acronis TI 8 and 11.

 

I haven't tried this but - theoretically the SD card should act as far as the PC is concerned as a hard drive not as a flash drive.

SD cards are normally formatted as FAT 16 or 32 (with 16 being the more usual). Many embedded computers (PC104 format and similar) use SD cards as bootable media. The only problem that I can see is if the manufacturer of the SD card has done some fancy partitioning work of there own.

Check in the PC's BIOS that the SD card reader is in the list of bootable devices, if it is, then the only remianing problem would be if the rescue media builder can recognise the SD card, and as I said above, under Windows it ought to as the drive should appear to the system as a normal drive - in theory this should be the case for booting from Linux - but I've never programmed in Linux, so can't be absolutely sure on this.

Colin

 

From further research it seems the BIOS can be set to give USB priority although the sales guy told me the Advent couldn't boot from USB.

It seems booting has been achieved, at least by some, from USB stick, SD card and USB CD-ROM.

I may take the external USB HD option rather than SD since it's cheaper by capacity and I have one or two spares.

I'll study the guide a bit further but I suspect you don't overwrite the MBR on the internal HD and the MBR on the attached USB HD is used.

Thanks for the reply.

 

acro,

I made both a bootable "acronis" flash drive and a bootable "Acronis" USB hard drive following instructions elsewhere in this forum by MudCrab. On one PC I am able to boot/write images to/restore images from the bootable USB hard drive, but on the other, I can boot from the flash drive but not the bootable USB. This still works OK, in that having booted from the flash drive and with Acronis then running in memory, I can write to and restore from the USB hard drive. I don't see why you couldn't at least use this latter approach booting from an SD card and keeping your images on an external USB drive.

 

If you follow the instructions to setup the flashdrive, USB hard drive or SD card, you will only overwrite the MBR on that device, not your internal drive.

 

I hoped that would work. If I can get a cheap SD card, which shouldn't need to be large capacity, I could leave it permanently in the slot.

On powering up and pressing F10 the option is given of booting from the SD.
I'm pretty sure this is normally to restore from a back up of the Recovery Partition on an SD card, but in this situation, for me, to boot into TI.
I can then leave the external USB HD disconnected until needed.

On a second reading the penny dropped. Thanks for the excellent guide.

Thanks guys.