SD or USB Flash Boot Help

My laptop is a r100 and doesnt have an internal optical drive and isnt playing nice with my external USB drives. I was hoping there was another way to install onto or boot from and SD card. My unit has a built in SD card reader and the BIOS states that it can boot from SD. I would rather that than a USB solution as the external boot disc failed so i dont know if the bios just lacks the drivers for the drive or for the usb ports themselves. A network boot seems fairly complicated and since i cant boot from any of my cd's i dont want to risk a failed install as i'll have no way of recoverying my system.

So basically im looking for a way to either load the install image(of any distro) on the to SD card (4GB max as im pretty sure my drive is not SDHC compitible) and install onto my notebook's HDD from there or simply install distro itself onto the card and then boot from SD whenever I need linux.

 

Are you sure your USB drive is set up as bootable? That's the main problem I've run into... any relatively recent computer has pretty good support for USB booting. If you're looking at Ubuntu, check this out:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

 

are you referin to the drive itself or the BIOS setting? because i've tried every possible bios setting. The drive itself is fine as i regularly boot from it on my other computers...

 

Ahhh. That's what I wanted to know. The same procedure for preparing a USB drive should apply to preparing an SD card. I'd recommend a 2GB card if you can... 4GB and higher are SDHC.

 

Ok I dont understand what "the same procedure" is...Thats the whole point of this post...I need help on how to set up the drive to boot off of.

 

you said that you dont want to risk a failed install? make sure to backup data. Even those who have done the install a few times can still screw up.

and, from what ive read i would say that "the same procedure" is included in the link he provided.