My old Asus EeePC was collecting dust since its display backlight driver chip got broken in August 2012. Now, for a project at the university its second life seems to be come. Unfortunately I disassembled its RAM memory and the HDD. Whilst it was no problem to assemble the built-off RAM again, the HDD was already built-in into an external HDD enclosure for a use as backup drive. I din't want to disassemble it again, so what should I do to get my EeePC running again...? The solution was pretty simple: with an SD Card.
But why after all using an SD Card, when an USB flash drive would be more common? The answer is pretty simple. An SD Card can be put into the reader in the EeePC and is covered completely. So its mechanically robust against collisions and cannot be torn off accidentally nor removed. And at least: why not using an SD card?
So greenly I bought an SDHC card, inserted it into the EeePC and created a bootable USB flash drive with openSuSE 12.2. An old flat screen, connected to the VGA port replaced the (already removed) display. The WiFi antenna was just a wire any more. But... it worked. I was able to install openSuSE without any (greater) problems. I just needed some more attention to create the right partitioning with GPartEd. The tricky issue was to not-select the USB flash drive as installation drive - just the SD card.
A much greater problem seemed to set the correct device for booting from. On several internet blogs you can read similar posts handling the installation of SuSE and other Linux distributions on SD cards, telling that the only problem is the boot loader. However, it isn't as easy. But finally, when SuSE tried to create a boot loader at the MBR (in my case sdb), the installation programm reports some errors. You can ignore then, but SuSE can't... so how to proceed?
The installation will end any way - somehow successfully like it appears. But when trying to boot just with the SD Card, you get only a rescue console with much luck. But why? The same installation performed on a flash drive will boot and run without any problems. There is no significant difference in the used media - except the digital right management of an SD Card. And this is the problem. SD cards in most cases are pre-formatted with an MBR and a basic partitioning matching the requirements of most SD card devices like digital cameras etc. and even formatting the card with Linux or Windows won't create a partitioning that will be albe to boot Linux properly. So first i stuck in that misery. Also deleting already present partitions on th card with Windows Disk Management console leads not to success. I tried several ways and performed also many installations without success.
Now it was at the time to be smart. When a USB flash drive of ~8 GB will boot and an SD card of the same size does not, it may be possible to clone the flash drive to the card. Linux and Unix contains the tool dd (DiskDump) for copying a drive one-to-one to another drive (or file). So i took the Live Stick again and cloned the flash drive with the properly installed openSuSE system and cloned it to the SD card. The I booted the EeePC with that card and came only to a rescue console...
Investigating the boot option entries with that rescue console showed the reason. The configuration was set to boot GRUB2 from a special device, identified by the device's UUID. The UUID of the SD card was another one than those of the flash drive. It was easy to recognize beacause the manufacturer name of the flash drive was contained in the UUID. But the rescue console didnt make me able to fix the problem with it. So what to do? I decided to use the USB Flash drive again to fix it (what meant to clone the drive again to the SDHC card).
So openSUSE 12.2 uses Grub2 as bootloader. Investigations revealed that there is a special config file,
to
Comparing this two screenshots you can see that there is clearly the device UUID with the manufacturer of the flash drive in the picture above. I'm still investigating WHY GRUB2 uses UUIDs. Nobody mirroring a system does ever want issues like these.
After this the legend continues, telling that it is neccessary to "grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg to update the main configuration file." So I ran the command and tried to reboot - considering the boot options and checking the bootloader menu entried. The device had changed. Also the system did boot regularly. After all i cloned the flash drive again to the SDHC card and tried to boot from it - successfully. The problem was solved.
After all I unfortunately discovered that fixing the boot issues was the least problem. :( Meanwhile Linux is celebrating its 20th birthday but I still desperate on configuring it. There are the same weaknesses like ten years before. For instance try to configure a connection script for using the WiFi connection in runlevel 3. I get mad trying to connect with the command iwconfig or wpa_supplicant. In runlevel 5 the "Connection Manager" takes control instead of using Yast2 - why? And again there are three half-ready solutions for one problem, competing against each other and yo rather get mad than finding an easy or common way in a froum to get your problem solved. And just like ten years before you are investigating forum and you find ten different answers (each one ist the best). Finally it seemed that I got mad because I'm still using Linux (Windows 7 didnt make any trouble during installation and after). Why didnt I stick at Windows 7? I simply must have become crazy.
But why after all using an SD Card, when an USB flash drive would be more common? The answer is pretty simple. An SD Card can be put into the reader in the EeePC and is covered completely. So its mechanically robust against collisions and cannot be torn off accidentally nor removed. And at least: why not using an SD card?
So greenly I bought an SDHC card, inserted it into the EeePC and created a bootable USB flash drive with openSuSE 12.2. An old flat screen, connected to the VGA port replaced the (already removed) display. The WiFi antenna was just a wire any more. But... it worked. I was able to install openSuSE without any (greater) problems. I just needed some more attention to create the right partitioning with GPartEd. The tricky issue was to not-select the USB flash drive as installation drive - just the SD card.
A much greater problem seemed to set the correct device for booting from. On several internet blogs you can read similar posts handling the installation of SuSE and other Linux distributions on SD cards, telling that the only problem is the boot loader. However, it isn't as easy. But finally, when SuSE tried to create a boot loader at the MBR (in my case sdb), the installation programm reports some errors. You can ignore then, but SuSE can't... so how to proceed?
The installation will end any way - somehow successfully like it appears. But when trying to boot just with the SD Card, you get only a rescue console with much luck. But why? The same installation performed on a flash drive will boot and run without any problems. There is no significant difference in the used media - except the digital right management of an SD Card. And this is the problem. SD cards in most cases are pre-formatted with an MBR and a basic partitioning matching the requirements of most SD card devices like digital cameras etc. and even formatting the card with Linux or Windows won't create a partitioning that will be albe to boot Linux properly. So first i stuck in that misery. Also deleting already present partitions on th card with Windows Disk Management console leads not to success. I tried several ways and performed also many installations without success.
Now it was at the time to be smart. When a USB flash drive of ~8 GB will boot and an SD card of the same size does not, it may be possible to clone the flash drive to the card. Linux and Unix contains the tool dd (DiskDump) for copying a drive one-to-one to another drive (or file). So i took the Live Stick again and cloned the flash drive with the properly installed openSuSE system and cloned it to the SD card. The I booted the EeePC with that card and came only to a rescue console...
Investigating the boot option entries with that rescue console showed the reason. The configuration was set to boot GRUB2 from a special device, identified by the device's UUID. The UUID of the SD card was another one than those of the flash drive. It was easy to recognize beacause the manufacturer name of the flash drive was contained in the UUID. But the rescue console didnt make me able to fix the problem with it. So what to do? I decided to use the USB Flash drive again to fix it (what meant to clone the drive again to the SDHC card).
So openSUSE 12.2 uses Grub2 as bootloader. Investigations revealed that there is a special config file,
/etc/default/grub
that need to be changed to fix this problem. Listening to the openSUSE home page the legend tells that you just need to modify the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. But if it is that easy, why they don't use it as default configuration? However, I changed that line from
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=" resume=/dev/disk/by-id/usb-Kingston_DT_101_G2_001CC0C83B35EA90142A0042-0:0-part1 splash=silent quiet showopts"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=" resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent quiet showopts"
After this the legend continues, telling that it is neccessary to "grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg to update the main configuration file." So I ran the command and tried to reboot - considering the boot options and checking the bootloader menu entried. The device had changed. Also the system did boot regularly. After all i cloned the flash drive again to the SDHC card and tried to boot from it - successfully. The problem was solved.
After all I unfortunately discovered that fixing the boot issues was the least problem. :( Meanwhile Linux is celebrating its 20th birthday but I still desperate on configuring it. There are the same weaknesses like ten years before. For instance try to configure a connection script for using the WiFi connection in runlevel 3. I get mad trying to connect with the command iwconfig or wpa_supplicant. In runlevel 5 the "Connection Manager" takes control instead of using Yast2 - why? And again there are three half-ready solutions for one problem, competing against each other and yo rather get mad than finding an easy or common way in a froum to get your problem solved. And just like ten years before you are investigating forum and you find ten different answers (each one ist the best). Finally it seemed that I got mad because I'm still using Linux (Windows 7 didnt make any trouble during installation and after). Why didnt I stick at Windows 7? I simply must have become crazy.
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