The thinkpad x230

[JamesRoss]

Hey! this is so cool! I just discovered your webpage!
My mother liked to travel down to belize every winter to get out of the Canadian deep-freeze. Her Satillite c 620 died from a drop so I told her to get a business class thinkpad. I helped her find a x230 because she had a samsung 10.1 that I did not like. I need a keyboard to interface with. I bought her a keyboard for her samsung, but can't recall ever seeing her using it... ha haaa....

She took the X230 down to Belize and dropped it on the concrete so the hard drive died. The hardrive is still dead but I have the x230 still working after she got a T430 without my help. She stayed with Thinkpad... I was in glee... I had no input and she bought a T430... I could not believe it. I taught her what to look for.

So now I am running puppylinux on this X230 partially off of the SD card. I need to use a thumb drive to initiate the the boot, but once the boot is acknowleged the SDcard takes over.

Do any of you thinksters know how I can make this thinkpad boot without a hardrive nor thumbdrive? Souly off of the SDcard... that would be nice Someone said an ini file needs to be present, but I did not figure this out into a working boot.

[axur-delmeria]

Do any of you thinksters know how I can make this thinkpad boot without a hardrive nor thumbdrive? Souly off of the SDcard... that would be nice Someone said an ini file needs to be present, but I did not figure this out into a working boot.

AFAIK it's impossible to boot from the X230's SD card slot because of a lack of BIOS support.

Other laptops have a USB-based SD card reader, so the BIOS can use its generic USB boot routines. In contrast, the X230 has a PCIe-based card reader so that option's not available; a special boot routine must be written/programmed, and AFAIK neither Lenovo nor the manufacturer of that card reader chip have done so.

[bgravato]

I can confirm the X230 does cannot boot from the SD card.

SATA, mSATA or USB are your options for booting...