Booting from an SD card

if no drivers are needed to install & use the card, then my vote would be for yes... but I don't have a reader in front of me to test it.

my first esata card wouldn't boot the machine even tho disk utility said it was bootable because drivers had to be installed to make it work.

the flash based expresscards are bootable, but usually not very fast from the reviews i've seen.

The new MBPs (13" and 15" only) can boot from an SD card (Apple indicates this in a kbase article) because the new MBPs have an integrated SD card slot.

I don't think you'll be able to boot from an SD card in an ExpressCard reader. Admittedly, I haven't tried. But, I can tell you that an external FireWire drive with a bootable clone of my system can boot my MBP just fine from the FW port, but not when connected to a FW ExpressCard adapter. The adapter is otherwise 'plug-and-play' and required no drivers, etc., to mount a FW drive when the system is booted from the internal drive.

neuroanatomist wrote:
The new MBPs (13" and 15" only) can boot from an SD card (Apple indicates this in a kbase article) because the new MBPs have an integrated SD card slot.

I don't think you'll be able to boot from an SD card in an ExpressCard reader. Admittedly, I haven't tried. But, I can tell you that an external FireWire drive with a bootable clone of my system can boot my MBP just fine from the FW port, but not when connected to a FW ExpressCard adapter...

I need to finish my thought earlier - I have 2 esata cards, one has the silicon image chipset which requires 3rd party drivers, the other is a JMicron chipset with built in drivers. Both are expresscards.

The JMicron card boots the machine from an external esata drive. The SI card won't.

The macbook pros ARE bootable with certain expresscards. I wish I had one in front of me to test.

Can you boot an iMac from an SD card, provided the iMac has an SD Card Reader plugged into one of its USB ports?

Also, when you say "boot", are you talking about running just the Mac OS X operating system off an SD card, or Mac OS X AND all the user's files?

Reuben Feffer wrote:
Can you boot an iMac from an SD card, provided the iMac has an SD Card Reader plugged into one of its USB ports?

Also, when you say "boot", are you talking about running just the Mac OS X operating system off an SD card, or Mac OS X AND all the user's files?

Booting doesn't mean the users files in typical usage of the word.

Suppose you had an SDHC card large enough to store the entire contents of your Macintosh HD. Could you simply format that SDHC to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then copy the entire contents across from your Macintosh HD to the SDHC card?

And then, simply pop the SDHC card in any Mac you want, and run your operating system and all of your files, straight off the card?

If you want to boot from an Intel Mac make certain that it has a GUID partition (you'll either need to check that with Apple's Disk Utility or re-partition it using same). Also, you'll need at least a 16GB card (although it can be done on only 8GB you'll have to do some "trimming" to fit it on such a small disc).

I've been able to boot from both 10.5.6 and 10.5.7 when using an external SanDisk Extreme or SanDisk Micromate reader with a Toshiba 16GB class 4 SDHC card. I've also booted from CF cards using the SanDisk Extreme card reader. Note, you may have some problems when trying to boot from certain models of card readers.

Suppose you had an SDHC card large enough to store the entire contents of your Macintosh HD. Could you simply format that SDHC to Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and then copy the entire contents across from your Macintosh HD to the SDHC card?

You could do that but it wouldn't work that well because current SD cards are quite a bit slower than your standard internal hard disc drives. Also, I think you'd find that standard hard drives would be more reliable than a removable flash card.

As for performance, I find that a class 4 16GB SDHC card can boot to the Finder desktop in about two mintues. However, my internal drive can boot in only 45 seconds.

Waymen wrote:
If you want to boot from an Intel Mac make certain that it has a GUID partition (you'll either need to check that with Apple's Disk Utility or re-partition it using same).

If you mean this in general this information is false which deos not prevent it from appearing here endlessly.

Any mac will boot fine from an APM or GUID partition. The DVD that you buy with a retail OSX box is actually APM not GUID as an example of that.

You can only INSTALL OSX on an Intel mac to GUID. If you clone that boot drive to an APM drive, e.g. another internal drive or an external drive you can boot form the clone fine.

When I had Intel and PPC macs I had a APM Lacie OSX boot disk with Diskwarrior and a few other utilities for diagnostics and it booted both.

I installed 10.5.7 on a 16GB SanDisk Ultra II SDHC card using my new MBP. It ran very slowly! The SD card had less than 1 GB free after the install. How much of this slowness has to do with the SD card having hardly any room left, and how much has to do with the speed of the SD card?
Will I notice a big speed increase if I were to use a 32GB SDHC card?

Unless you need all of the various language support files (e.g. Chinese, etc.) and print drivers you can reduce the Mac OS X image to about 10GB by doing a custom install. Then you can reduce that by nearly another 750MB by removing most of the text-to-speech voices AFTER you do a custom install (you'll need to remove the voice files manually). The speech voices are at the following path:

/System/Library/Speech/Voices/

One voice (Alex.SpeechVoice) is 700MB by itself -- that's really the only one you need to remove.

If you do a custom install and (optionally) remove the Alex voice I think you will find the performance somewhat better. But, it's not going to be anything close to a standard hard drive (i.e. it will still be slow).

depending on the class of card, some are faster than others.

even with a class 6, it's not going to be very speedy, so this should be reserved for an emergency situation.

you also don't need all the printer, fonts, languages, etc. installed.

I don't know about an ExpressCard, but both my 1st generation Mac Pro and my 1st generation Aluminum MacBook can boot from an SD card when using an external, USB-based card reader.