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I am trying to revive an old Surface 3 tablet with a dead eMMC. I want to install Linux (I tried different Ubuntu variants) on a 128 GB microSD card, but it seems that Intel Cherry Trail UEFIs do not allow booting from it.

Thus, I successfully installed Ubuntu on the microSD card, with the ESP and /boot on a USB stick which I can boot from, but Grub2 only shows a prompt and the ls command only shows the USB stick partitions. I tried re-installing Grub using different live distros, also tried Super Grub2 Disk, rEFInd, toggling Secure Boot, but the result is still the same: my microSD card is not detected. However, the card is detected with installers and during live sessions.

Do you have any idea to help me?

geckoflume
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    I think it will be difficult, when grub cannot see the microSD card. But maybe it is an option to boot via a USB hub, so that you will not suffer too much from occupying a USB slot, and run the tablet from USB. If the Linux system is small enough, there might be enough RAM to run in RAM (with the boot option `toram`) and then you can unplug the USB drive that you booted from. – sudodus Oct 31 '21 at 17:07
  • @sudodus thank you for your reply, but I really want to avoid having the USB slot occupied, to use the tablet in portrait mode thus I can't consider this solution. I did install Ubuntu using `toram` to install /boot on another USB drive, but the RAM is already quite full with only 2 GB available... Do you have an idea how I could debug this, maybe by loading additional drivers, or using another bootloader? – geckoflume Nov 01 '21 at 18:15
  • When grub cannot see the SD drive, I can think of two ways that might work: 1. Install new BIOS system / firmware; 2. Try other operating systems with other grub versions or other bootloading systems (instead of grub). – sudodus Nov 01 '21 at 18:22

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