Fun with Windows 10 dual boot on HP 14 laptop using additional SD card
by commandlinegamer from LinuxQuestions.org on (#4QNN1)
Trying to install Slackware current (as of 11/9/2019, courtesy of Alien Bob's ISO).
Windows 10 is already installed on the flash storage, which shows as /dev/mmcblk0.
To keep Windows unchanged, I've added an SD card into the card slot. This is detected during Slack installation as /dev/sda.
Installation proceeds fine, apart creating a partition for Slack on the SD card.
Booting afterward is where the problem is. Would start loading kernel then fail trying to boot the Slack partition.
I'd created an initrd, adding in every module which I found to be loaded during installation to ensure the SD card and built-in storage were found and enumerated correctly.
Copied said initrd to the EFI partition in mmcblk0 successfully.
But missed the fact that the filesystem module (ext4 in this case) didn't appear when I checked previously. Rebuilt the initrd including this, this time, and added vfat for luck.
Appears to be booting as desired now. But fingers still crossed, as I thought I'd cracked it previously. Have gotten further with this than other distros.
Attempted to do dual-boot with Mint and OpenSuse, and they all fall down at the restart stage, after installation.
Spoke too soon: "mount: mounting /dev/sda1 on /mnt failed: no such file or directory". First boot since unplugging the DVD drive.
Can mount filesystem manually from the shell prompt I get.
Weird: it will boot if the DVD drive is plugged in, even though I've not booting from that. I'm guessing there's some device detection/switching shenanigans going on.


Windows 10 is already installed on the flash storage, which shows as /dev/mmcblk0.
To keep Windows unchanged, I've added an SD card into the card slot. This is detected during Slack installation as /dev/sda.
Installation proceeds fine, apart creating a partition for Slack on the SD card.
Booting afterward is where the problem is. Would start loading kernel then fail trying to boot the Slack partition.
I'd created an initrd, adding in every module which I found to be loaded during installation to ensure the SD card and built-in storage were found and enumerated correctly.
Copied said initrd to the EFI partition in mmcblk0 successfully.
But missed the fact that the filesystem module (ext4 in this case) didn't appear when I checked previously. Rebuilt the initrd including this, this time, and added vfat for luck.
Appears to be booting as desired now. But fingers still crossed, as I thought I'd cracked it previously. Have gotten further with this than other distros.
Attempted to do dual-boot with Mint and OpenSuse, and they all fall down at the restart stage, after installation.
Spoke too soon: "mount: mounting /dev/sda1 on /mnt failed: no such file or directory". First boot since unplugging the DVD drive.
Can mount filesystem manually from the shell prompt I get.
Weird: it will boot if the DVD drive is plugged in, even though I've not booting from that. I'm guessing there's some device detection/switching shenanigans going on.