1

I have been able to install chrome OS on a 4gb flash drive and it boots just fine on my little ASUS eee900A. But I don't to worry about it sticking out of the eee and getting knocked out by accident. And the position of the usb ports on the eee aren't really conducive to prolonged use with the usb stick in.

So I was thinking, I have a SD card slot I am mostly not using. In it is a 16gb SDhc card that is just sitting there. So I was thinking It would be a good place to have chrome installed. That way I can swap between Ubuntu NBR (currently installed) and Chrome at boot. That way if I need to work offline it is not completely worthless, but I have the option of the lightweight chrome for most of my usage. The last thing I really used it for was watching Desert Bus for Hope without impacting the performance of my primary machine, and chrome could possibly do a better job being lighter weight.

My primary machine has a sd card slot so I attempted to follow the same steps I used to install chrome on a usb stick.

  1. Download chromiumos.img
  2. Download Win 32 Disk Imager
  3. As Administrator use Disk Imager to write chromiumos.img to USB stick
  4. ...
  5. Profit, or at least a functioning chrome install.

At step 3 I get an error that there is not enough space on the drive error 8:, which is odd since my 4gb stick worked just fine.

So how should I go about doing this? Use a different disk imager? Some how duplicate the partitions on the thumb drive onto the sdhc card? I do have a functioning linux install on the eee so linux based solutions are welcome.

Or are SD cards just not cut out for this? The asus boot media menu does include the SD card as a valid option for booting so I would assume that I can boot from it.

Thoughts? Directions? Trout about the head and shoulders?

3 Answers 3

1

raw-copy the USB block device to the SDHC with

dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY bs=8192

make doubly sure you have the right devices for sdX and sdY, or you'll overwrite something... You may want to use /dev/disk/by-id for more descriptive device names.

You may then need to adjust the partition table on the larger device to use the extra space available. If that requires moving partitions around, then maybe you should copy partition-by-partition instead. But you'll probably need to make it bootable by copying over the mbr. dd bs=512 count=1

If you don't understand what this does, DON'T DO IT. You will OVERWRITE YOUR DISKS.

2
  • No worries, I would be doing this on a netbook, so if I futz it up nothing will be lost.
    – tvanover
    Dec 10, 2009 at 4:38
  • It's sort of a rule that one should never post anything that someone could copy and paste and destroy their system with. Hence sdX instead of sda for the example. And obviously the big warning. Glad you have good backups for your netbook. :) Dec 10, 2009 at 10:17
1

can't you just clone the USB stick to the SDHC card (e.g. with CloneZilla)?

0

I run ChromeOS Cherry from a 2GB SD card. It works with my HP mini 1000 broadcom chip set,and a wide array of wireless configurations.

1
  • Great, how did you get it installed?
    – tvanover
    Dec 10, 2009 at 4:35

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .