HP Stream 11 boot from SD

[piphil]

I am thinking of buying an HP Stream 11 laptop. Is it possible to install a second OS e.g. linux onto an SD card, and then boot from the SD card?

[VJ_R]

Hi

My Assumption is if you are using a USB based reader for SD card u have the OS on.. you should be able to Boot from USB and that should work.

[piphil]

The machine itself has a built-in SD card reader, which can read from <32GB SD cards. So basically what I'm asking is if I can boot from that reader specifically - although it's useful to know that I can boot from USB.

I would be hoping to have an SD card permanently in the built-in reader, to allow dual-booting, as this is neater than having to use it with a stick sticking out of one of the USB ports!

[piphil]

...alhtough I guess an equally acceptable solution would be to use a "nano" (small) sized USB stick. I would have to try very hard to remember not to pull it out however... 😉

[RockDoctor]

I know I'm late to the party, but I just got my Stream 11 two weeks ago.

I am dual-booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu-Mate 16.04, with only /boot on the SSD. I shrank the Windows partition , partition by 500 MB. , to give me space for a 500 MB /boot partition for Linux. I downloaded the Ubuntu-Mate iso, dd'd it to a 2GB flash drive, inserted a 4GB SD card into the slot (it's all I had) and (UEFI) booted the flash drive. I then downloaded gparted and used it to create a gpt-type partition table on the SD card with a single 4GB ext4 partition, and to create the 500 MB partition on the SSD. Ran ubiquity, told it to use the 500 MB partition for /boot and put / on the SD card. It works! ESC  when booting to get the function-key menu, F9 to select the boot device, select Ubuntu, and boot. Space is obviously very tight, but with a higher-capacity  SD card, this will definitely work for me

[stellarfirefly]

The short answer, in case anybody is still asking, is that the HP Stream 11 does not have native BIOS capability to boot directly from an SD card.

This is true at least as of this post but this model is now out of production, so further BIOS updates are unlikely.  RockDoctor's solution, to place /boot onto a device from which the BIOS may boot, and then place the rest of the Linux install onto the SD card, should work well and it is the standard solution to the "BIOS cannot natively boot from an SD card" issue.  See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromSD for all the gory details.