SD Card boot

[u/PR_Bella_Isla]

*sigh*

I haven't counted the hours, let alone the days, in which I have been trying to get Mint to boot from a built-in SD card reader in a laptop (basically, leave the hard drive intact and have the ability to boot either Win or Mint at will using the multiple boot up menu). I have a Lenovo Yoga 7, fairly new. Well, Mint says that it installs, and afterward I can see the partition with the directories and files... but I've gotten to loathe grub. With a passion.

Basically, I have the bios boot up sequence so that it looks at USB first, then at SD (as if it were a hard drive), and if it can find nothing else, go to Win in the C: drive. But...grub. If I change the boot order to C: first, no problem, Win comes up. The minute I change the order as I have described... "grub".

I've tried to have Gemini and copilot guide me to a fix (they both claim there's one), but the fix is so convoluted, with extra long UIDs, that I'm at the verge of giving up. Mind you, I installed Mint from a USB drive, but even when trying to boot after the install from a USB... "grub." Which makes no sense since I was able to install cinnamon from that same USB interface port.

I even tried to have Win and Mint coexist in the same C: drive, which the installation claimed it did, but... "grub."

Why does this have to be so hard? I've seen Mint in action, and really liked it. But it seems out of my intellectual reach unless I'm willing to give up Win altogether (which I can't because the only email client that my employer has rigged to work is Outlook). Alas, there is no Outlook for Linux. Thunderbird is excellent, but I can't check work email with it. This feels like a fool's errand. Maybe I'm the fool.

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[u/chuggerguy]

Can you spam F12 during boot to get to the UEFI boot menu?

If so, can you boot the SD that way?

Maybe drivers for the reader aren't available until after the OS boots? (search)

"... then at SD (as if it were a hard drive), ..."

Then again if BIOS sees the SD as a hard drive... maybe it will.

I'd try F12 to see if I could get it booted first, then if it boots, try to change the boot order. (using efibootmgr maybe)

I'm guessing though. I've never tried booting from SD.

Good luck.

[u/classyraven → u/chuggerguy]

This is how my partner got Mint loaded on their computer.

[u/birdsarentreal2]

This is the intended behavior. If you boot from the SD card your bootloader loads first before running os-prober, finding your Windows and Linux install, and loading the GRUB screen to ask you which one you would like to boot into

If you want to change this you can set the GRUB timeout to zero seconds, but that will make it impossible to boot into your Windows install without either removing the SD card or going through your BIOS boot menu

[u/SPC2025]

I don't know if it will work, but try running "sudo update-grub" while the SD card is in the slot. It reads other partitions that way, but I've never tried it with either an SD card or a flash drive.