Booting from an ExpressCard

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hello everyone,
I just bought a USB 3.0 ExpressCard from ebay which to my pleasant surprise works natively under Linux.
I want to take it to the next level though, booting from a drive, which is connected to one of the USB 3.0 ports. I am aware, that this is not possible to do so directly from the BIOS, but I found some people on the internet saying, that it should be possible to make BIOS boot the internal drive and an OS running on that internal drive then somehow hands over control to the external drive and continues bootup. My question is, is it possible to set it up in such a way that I will be able to:
a) boot to other OSes on the internal drive
b) boot the external drive on other computers normally
To save some time, a lot of information about my setup can be found here.
Thanks a lot,
GS

2

IMO simple and quick check to determine feasibility…

Power on your machine with your Expresscard and disk attached…
And open your BIOS.
Does your disk show up as a disk?
If yes, then your Expresscard/disk is bootable.
Then, inspect your BIOS boot options whether your “removable device” Expresscard is an option.
Else,
you’re SOL.

TSU

3

As I mentioned before, it is not possible to boot it directly from the BIOS, only very few computers support that. However I heard it’s possible to do so using a small OS on the internal drive acting as a bootloader, being able to access the ExpressCard.

4

Booting is fundamentally a sequential chain of events, each has to happen for the result to be successful.
Grub by itself can be considered a micro-OS( Some things like Ceph can run on Grub without a full OS), but is irrelevant if you can’t reach the point of loading GRUB.

In the same way,
Nothing can happen if you can’t boot bootable media.

TSU

5

I can have something, GRUB, small linux-based OS, whatever, installed on the internal HDD, boot it and then move to the express card. The same way you would boot another OS or medium from the GRUB menu.

6

I’ve worked with many dozens of computers over the past 30 years, and this is the first time I have read of a computer that does not have the capability to boot to the BIOS.

Did I read your post correctly?

7

All that you need is /boot on drive bootable from BIOS. The root filesystem itself may be anywhere, it is important that bootloader and kernel are accessible from within BIOS.

Sounds like you did not.

8

[quote="“arvidjaar,post:7,topic:137275”]

Sounds like you did not.[/QUOTE]

Indeed.

Noting this quote …

For the OP (Greenscreener) Typically, when I have set up a PC boot to an external hard drive I go into the BIOS, and look to see what ‘drives’ the BIOS can see.

If it can see the external drive (or ExpressCard in your case) I then go in the BIOS to the area in which one selects the boot order. In there typically one can see the external hard drive listed. In your case it would be the ExpressCard. I would then setup the BIOS to 1st boot to the external USB drive.

Now if that ExpressCard has been setup with an OS and a boot loader, and if the BIOS has it as the 1st boot device (before the internal hard drive), it should be possible to boot directly to that Express Card from switch ON, even prior to the Internal drive being accessed for boot. Of course one first needs to install the OS on the Express Card (and of course the BIOS needs to recognize it as a ‘drive’).

On a number of occasions (some years back) I have installed openSUSE on an external USB drive, and then plugged that drive into a PC (whose BIOS has been pre-configured to boot to an external USB device) and booted the OS.

Not every computer supports booting to a USB device, but every PC I have purchased the past 10 years has supported such. Hence I struggle to believe the assertion that " only very few computers support that" as my experience suggests otherwise.

Possible (likely perhaps) I do not understand what you are attempting to do.

Best wishes in your efforts.

9

Sorry,
I see I’ve caused quite a bit of confusion here.

In this message, I meant:

I know how to boot an external USB device from the BIOS boot menu, I’ve been doing that almost every day for a few years now. The problem is, that most BIOSes don’t support booting from an ExpressCard.

That’s wonderful! Now how can I do that in practice? This is the current state (quote from another thread):

I have GRUB2 installed and managed by the respective Tumbleweed’s YaSTs on both these drives. Is it then possible to setup the internal GRUB2 to start the external Tumbleweed (which is now connected through this ExpressCard), while still meeting these criteria:

I hope I didn’t make this even more confusing.
Thanks a lot so far,
GS

10

You need to create partition on internal drive and use it as /boot for the second installation and configure second installation to install bootloader in partition (/boot); then you can chainload this bootloader from within the “master” bootloader.

11

But the second installation already exists and I want to be able to use standalone too.