Windows 10: Is it possible to have a Inspiron 3655 boot from sdcard?

It has a normal reader, but I'm having trouble getting it to boot from that. I need to run a utility on a iso, used rufus to formate the sdcard and everything. It isn't showing as a bootable option. I would just use a blank cd or dvd if I had one, but I don't atm. I've ordered a usb flash drive that should solve all my problems, but in the meantime is there anything I can do?


I used to have a rooted phone with TWRP on it but my current phone doesn't have a TWRP recovery mode and the "best" app I could find for this (droiddrive) doesn't work at all for me. I can't even format the damned sd card using that utitlity on a 2nd pc.


The thing about TWRP that was amazing is you can use your phone's internal sdcard and boot it on almost any pc as it shows as a bootable USB drive. Drivedroid purports to do the same thing but I could never get it to work. There is no TWRP for my cheapo galaxy 3 prime. In all other things it is just as good as a Galaxy S5 (albeit heavier) but on custom FW it is very lacking.

:)

 

Windows 10 Home Update 1709 KB4054517

The make and model of my computer is a Dell Inspiron 3655 Windows 10 Home.

I have tried to download manually but, I will try again and will try the additional options you have provided.

Thank You

 

Is it possible to boot Windows 10 from a UEFI RAM Disk?

Andre,

In case it wasn't clear from my original post, the partition I'm putting on the ramdisk is the EFI System Partition (ESP),
not the boot partition (C, which is still in its original location on disk. As best I can tell, the Windows loader doesn't modify anything on the ESP (except a few timestamps in the BCD), so I don't see how the volatile nature of
the ramdisk would be an issue. Are you saying that the Windows loader would refuse to boot from an ESP that appears to reside on something other than a physical disk? How would it even know that the ramdisk is not a physical disk? The documentation I've seen
suggests that the Windows loader uses UEFI protocols to access the ESP, and the ramdisk's file system is perfectly accessible to UEFI applications.

Thanks,
Brett S.

 

About 99% of PCs do not have the capability to boot from an SD card. I have heard of people with limited success in booting it from an SD card to USB port adapter that makes the SD card appear as a flash drive, but not built-in SD card readers.

 

Great news! I found a USB adapter that takes microsd. I didn't even know I had this. Shouldn't have any problems now, will report back.

 

It is still not working. I even found a spare external USB drive. That should be the absolute standard thing to boot from when all else fails, yet it is still not working... Hiram's and GParted and DBAN none of them boot. This Dell Inspiron 3655 even recognizes the drive in BIOS. I've disabled all boot options except USB, also tried turning off AHCI/ATA options and still the same either way!!! OMG wtf is this?

 

Hi there

the problem with most PC's is that while the BIOS will boot from a USB device the actual OS needs to load the SD card driver before it will recognize the sd card so i'm afraid you are hosed up in this one.

Now some servers - for example the small cube shaped HP Gen 8 microserver (which I use as a NAS server) has an internal USB port (inside the box) plus an internal micro SD card slot. The BIOS will allow you to boot from either of these directly - you can see it in the BIOS boot menu- plus of course HDD and the external USB 2 slots (X2). There's also 2 X usb3 slots but this particular server won't boot from USB3 - the OS again needs to load the driver before the USB3 slots are recognized.

I boot from the micro sd card (I just have /boot on that card) and from the /boot partition it loads the rest of the OS from my SSD. It's a convoluted arrangement - but the machine if I don't use the built in RAID (which is terrible) won't boot from the DVD port (where I've attached my SSD). SATA AHCI mode plus software raid (run from the booted OS Linux kernel - running Centos 7.2) is FAR superior on this server. I've 4 HDD's in the box which I have as a 2 lots of 2HDD's RAID arrays. I don't therefore want to have the OS on one of these which is the reason for storing the OS on the SSD and getting the system to boot from the micro sd card - it simply executes the bootstrap software which loads the OS from the SSD and then the SSD boots normally.

In any case even if your machine did boot SD card directly you wouldn't be able to run windows from it unless you had enterprise. You can of course boot linux from any recognized bootable device and then run Windows as a VM but from an SD card it would run incredibly slowly !!!!!.

Cheers
jimbo

 

I am using an external USB drive now. Should make troubleshooting easier. I disabled all boot op except usb in BIOS and still can't boot. Is there something more standard than Hiram's/DBAN to test this?