What is the cheapest way to connect a flash disk or SD card as a bootable drive?

1

I have several laptop computers that have had the HDDs and DVD drives removed. I want to be able to install Debian on them, but they have no form of boot-able storage. I want to find the cheapest possible method to get these working. Just buying a $10 USB flash drive is sufficient, but this must be plugged in to the external USB port, which leaves it to exposed.

The devices have the following ports:

  • One PC Card Type I slot, but I do not know if the computer can boot from anything placed here.
  • An empty drawer, in which the SATA HDD normally is placed, but it is missing the brackets to mount the HDD in snuggly. With an adapter, perhaps an SD card or USB flash drive could be placed in here, but I do not know of such an adapter.
  • An empty DVD drive. I found DVD-->HDD adapter caddies, I could not find any adapter for this to SD cards or USB flash drives.
  • According to BIOS, the system supports network boot.

What is the absolute cheapest way to get these computers setup as a functional Debian system?

Village

Posted 2017-06-25T01:06:39.527

Reputation: 119

Question was closed 2017-06-25T04:13:03.963

Buy a flash disk usb dongle, boot from USB – Moab – 2017-06-25T01:08:38.277

With USB or SD cards also take a look at their read/write speeds. Cheapest/slowest might make you reconsider your choice later. – African Networks – 2017-06-25T01:19:55.183

"USB flash drive ... plugged in to the external USB port, which leaves it to [sic] exposed" -- That's the consequence of your cheap requirement. AFAIK there are no SATA_device-to-USB or SATA_device-to-SDcard adapters – sawdust – 2017-06-25T01:55:09.537

Purchase drive, plug it in, boot to it. – Ramhound – 2017-06-25T03:44:29.633

Answers

1

First, I assume by, "but this must be plugged in to the external USB port, which leaves it to exposed," there is a single USB port and you wish to use other USB devices while the boot device is attached, and suggest you edit the question to clarify that. This might be feasible if it boots from a USB hub, which can be found for $US3 or less; you'll need to test.

Open BIOS/UEFI configuration and check what types of devices can be booted. Few machines allow booting from SD cards, but most laptops allow USB Flash devices (though you may need to enable "legacy boot"), and, if that is the case, get the least expensive 2 GB - 8 GB devices and write the preferred bootable Linux version to them. Format the drive as FAT or FAT32, not exFAT.

To make the USB drive writable (make any changes persistent), you can add another partition. More information on creating a persistent boot image is available from Ubuntu, an offshoot of Debian, so most of the information will be applicable to other Debian distros.

That said, as @African Networks mentions, write speed of most Flash memory is appallingly slow even when compared to a magnetic HDD. As long as operations are in main RAM, the laptop should be fine, but caching writes (e.g. browser pages) may be v e r y slow .

DrMoishe Pippik

Posted 2017-06-25T01:06:39.527

Reputation: 13 291

Asked: 2017-06-25T01:06:39.527

Viewed: 61 times

Active: 2017-06-25T03:42:38.733