[K12OSN] Booting Acer One from SD card?

[R. Scott Belford]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 3:19 AM, Rob Owens <rob.owens at biochemfluidics.com> wrote:
> Peter Scheie wrote:
>
>> My latest idea is to put the OS onto an SD card and boot the A1 from
>> that.  1GB SD cards are cheap, about $5, maybe less if you bought a
>> large quantity.  You could burn a bunch of these including extras, give
>> the extras to the teacher(s), so that if, when the kids grab the A1s for
>> whatever project, one says "This one's not booting", the teacher can
>> just pop in a new SD card.  This does have the problem of kids taking
>> the SD card, but it's easier to deal with than needing to have the A1 in
>> your possession to actually getting it working which would be the case
>> if the internal storage were used.
>>
> I tried it on my Acer Aspire One and it did not work.  The boot menu
> does not give the option to boot from the SD card, even when a bootable
> SD card is installed (I tried both SD slots).
>
> How about booting from one of these tiny, cheap usb sticks:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609294
>
> -Rob

The Acer one is the least friendly of the netbooks at usb and sd
booting.  I have relegated mine to the toilet

http://twitpic.com/pxkc

The sylvania netbook is good about booting from USB, but not SD.  The
Asus eeePC boots from SD and USB.  I only have these three models to
test, and, it took me some time to realize that I wasn't breaking
stuff and that instead each model simply boots differently.  I now
carry a bag full of keychains just to show off different OS's.

I'll be doing a little netbook roundup, with multiple OS's, at our
monthly Open Source Pizza at the University of Hawaii in a few weeks.
I'll share the ustream link once finished.