I've recently installed Bodhi Linux on my Efika Smartbook, and I'm running into behavior that may be a hardware problem. I'd welcome any insight readers of this forum might have. (I've also posted my issue on the Bodhi Linux forum.)

My Smartbook successfully boots into Bodhi Linux when the micro-SD slot is empty, but if a card is present, the boot fails. By "fail" I mean that all I see is that the led to the left of the keyboard flashes three times and then goes solid, nothing appears on the screen, and the green light that signals disk activity never comes on.

This is new behavior: I did successfully boot up with the micro-SD card installed at least once, probably more than once (I can't recall).

A little more history: Yesterday I was running normally with the micro-SD card present, doing some work (with Synaptic) that shouldn't have involved accessing that file system at all, when the system suddenly hung up. I powered down and tried to boot up, without success. (I didn't try rebooting without the micro-SD card at that point.) I removed the micro-SD and completely reinstalled Bodhi Linux. It booted up fine (without the micro-SD) and I proceeded to configure the system again. I next tried to install the micro-SD card: I powered down the system, inserted the card, and rebooted. Failure. I removed the card and attempted to boot again. This time it worked. I put the micro-SD card into the adapter and inserted it into the other SD slot. No problem. I could access the data on the card satisfactorily (and backed it up to the SSD).

I haven't yet reformatted the micro-SD card to see if that makes a difference, but, as I said, when it's accessed through the normal SD slot there doesn't appear to be a problem, and so I'm guessing the card itself is okay.

I'm a relative newbie, so it may be that I've failed to consider something really obvious. But it looks to me like something fundamental is broken, perhaps a hardware failure.

Mike

In my experience with Efika Mx Smartbook with Debian unstable (7.0) http://library.powerdeveloper.net/index.php/Debian
or with Ubuntu distributed with Efika Mx
http://library.powerdeveloper.net/index.php/Ubuntu

I have see that micro-sd frequently give kernel errors on boot, like yours.
So is not a problem of Bodhi Linux but is something related to the kernel , could be even some hardware limit.

_________________
http://deliriotecnologico.blogspot.com

There are two obvious reasons why this might happen;

[*] that there is a valid boot.scr file in partition 1 on the uSD (back) card, in which case U-Boot will prefer this instead of the one on PATA or the SDHC (left) slot.

[*] your uSD (or large SD) card is starting to get old and drawing too much power. Both SD card slots are on the same 3.15V rail and sometimes more current is drawn with two SD cards inserted. You can't change (reasonably) or bump the voltage from this value since it is a required boot supply.

I would wager that it's the first one, but in the end the supply problem with the SD card slots is simply a hardware bug you simply can't work around except to find a better combination of SD cards.

_________________
Matt Sealey