If you managed to boot on a mini SD card in the SD slot :

Could you report your success here with all the details and steps followed, thanks !

(my failures are here)

I got a new fit-PC2i the other day (don't know what version, but I assume it's recent) and now have it booting Fedora 13 from a micro-SDHC card in a mini-adapter in the slot. The card is an 8GB class-6 from Kingston. It works fine, but the filesystem is quite slow, as you'd expect.

To do this, I booted a Fedora 13 live-CD image from a USB stick, and then simply installed Fedora 13 onto the SD device. This made the SD card bootable just fine.

But, there was one other step to make the installed F13 come up: I had to add two modules to the initial ramdisk image: sdhci and sdhci_pci. Before I did that, the kernel would stop when it tried to mount the root filesystem, as it had not found the device for the SD reader. (Also make sure mmc_block and mmc_core are included, but that seems to happen automatically.)

The dracut command line would look something like this:



Then make sure to add the drivers to your dracut.conf, so that they get included again for future kernels.

I didn't have to do anything special in the BIOS, aside from making sure the boot device order was appropriate.

I hope this info helps you!

-Matt

PS: Now I have to figure out why the ethernet ports keep disappearing on each reboot, unless I disconnect the power.

Thank you matt for this feedback.

I'm glad Fedora do allow direct SD installation (once SD card modules loaded).

I think Mandriva One has the correct modules loaded by default because it can read and write to SD without any config step. The point is that it doesn't allow installation on that kind of device, it is not seen as a classic disk.
Well, I'm still booting with USB key, and I'm on my way to make a small SSD with a compact flash card and sata adapter, so... I will no longer need to boot SD I think. Maybe for a rescue system.

What boot loader did you choose ? (please give maximum details)

I used grub, which is the default standard boot loader with Fedora. Grub was installed on the MBR of the SD card, as you'd do with a normal disk. The Fedora installer gui simply showed the SD card as a normal disk device, called /dev/mmcblk0 . There were no special options that I had to specify on the kernel command line to get the boot to work (once I'd added the correct modules to the initial ramdisk image).

My root partition is /dev/mmcblk0p1 and a small swap fs is on /dev/mmcblk0p2 . The kernel version is 2.6.33.6 .

The root fs is ext4 now, but I might re-do the install with ext2 to avoid journaling on the flash card. Also, I'm considering making the whole thing read-only, and mounting /var via nfs on my main server, for logging and other transient data.

Thank you matt.
I tried a GRUB install also on the SD MBR, with the Mandriva graphical patched GRUB. It doesn't even reach stage1.
But as said before, I'll make my own 4GB sata SSD and it will solve my boot problem.

I wrote in your failure thread that I managed to install Super GRUB Disk on SD card and boot from it. I think if you do the same and then edit the GRUB menu file, you will be able to boot just about anything.

Yes yogev_ezra I've seen your post a week ago.
(I prefered not to resort to the disk image trick and have a direct installation)

I'm back on trying to boot on mini SD card...

• yogev_ezra's post (mentionned above) has some information about SD boot success...
  By the way, yogev_ezra did you maid some partitions on SD, once you wrote the floppy image at the beginning of it ? Is it ok ? I'm not sure about how to deal with the MBR with such an image directly written on the SD.
  
  Two other interesting pages about booting on SD :
• SourceForge.net: Redo Backup and Recovery: Topic: the long way to a bootable SD card
• Installing Linux on booting SD card - GPLdevWiki

I hope I'll be back here with some good news...
(I also plan to update to the latest BIOS, just in case, but SD boot is already supported, according to the support here)