How to boot from a SD card in an old computer

[Llinopinolino]

Hi all,
I need an advice on a piece of hardware that will enable my box to boot from an SD card. The answer is not so simple because I have a very old machine.
I have installed my freeNAS 8.0 in an old Dell Dimension 4300 with Intel Pentium IV CPU 2.00GHz, 500 MB of RAM. The motherboard does not have any SATA connections slot so I managed to install on a Samsung IDE disk, it works fine. I also attached a 1 TB disk to a RAID SATA PCI card. Also the motherboard BIOS does not support an USB boot (!).
I want to stress that this is just an experiment to make it work I am not expecting to be performing. If it works I will find a better machine.
So my question is: I want to install freeNAS in a SD card and make it bootable from there. I have purchased a DeLock converter IDE 40pin Card Reader intern SD Card but it does not boot because the BIOS does not recognize it.
Anybody has any experience or suggestion on which converter/adapter I can use to boot from the SD card?

Thanks

Lino

 

[tingo]

Not exactly an answer to your question, but the PLoP boot manager (http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html) can mak eold machines boot from usb. If you are just experimenting, burn it to a CD (or put it on a floppy) and now you machine can boot from usb.

 

[cyberjock]

Honestly, I'm not sure if the machine will even run with only 500MB of RAM. I think the lowest I've seen was 2GB.

 

[Richard J2]

Hi all,
I need an advice on a piece of hardware that will enable my box to boot from an SD card. The answer is not so simple because I have a very old machine.
I have installed my freeNAS 8.0 in an old Dell Dimension 4300 with Intel Pentium IV CPU 2.00GHz, 500 MB of RAM. The motherboard does not have any SATA connections slot so I managed to install on a Samsung IDE disk, it works fine. I also attached a 1 TB disk to a RAID SATA PCI card. Also the motherboard BIOS does not support an USB boot (!).
I want to stress that this is just an experiment to make it work I am not expecting to be performing. If it works I will find a better machine.
So my question is: I want to install freeNAS in a SD card and make it bootable from there. I have purchased a DeLock converter IDE 40pin Card Reader intern SD Card but it does not boot because the BIOS does not recognize it.
Anybody has any experience or suggestion on which converter/adapter I can use to boot from the SD card?

Thanks

Lino

Again - not exactly the answer, but I boot from a bootable ide to compact flash adapter with compact flash. (adapter + cf card < $20 on ebay ) I notice the cf adapters seem to be advertised as bootable or not - perhaps sd adapters are the same, that is some are non bootable. You can of course use a conventional hard disk - ide or sata to boot from, but Freenas takes over the whole of the boot disk, irrespective of how large.

I made up my 32 bit ( 4.5 tb, several old disks striped) NAS with Freenas 9.2 from a heap of aged, embarrassingly older, parts no longer used. It works fine.

 

[Lordadmiral Drake]

I think the point between SD and CF cards is that the CF interface is essentially IDE