Hey y’all
So I’m having some trouble booting into CachyOS (Arch) from the SD card slot. I can select it in the boot menu, it does its startup, displays the cachy logo as if it’s finished booting, then kicks me to rootfs emergency shell.
According to the dmesg log, the card slot isnt fully detected and the card isnt detected at all but internal storage is read just fine.
When booting from the Cachy live environment and from running dmesg, it seems like the SD card slot (mmc1) is detected about 15 seconds into the boot process as opposed to internal storage (mmc0) which is read pretty instantaneously. I booted the SD card from a USB adapter and it boots with no issue but has a similar timing as the live env. I tried with an Ubuntu live env as well with the exact same results.
Another observation I have is that even when the live CD detects the slot exists, it won’t read that there’s a card inside unless the card is removed and reinserted. This quirk is not present in Chrome OS which can open an SD card after boot without issue. I don’t think it’s a hardware problem.
Specs:
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Hardware: Asus C523NA
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Board Name: BABYTIGER
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Firmware: Mr. Chromebox’s RW_LEGACY UEFI
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Bootloader: Systemd (Grub has also been tested with the exact same results)
According to someone on reddit, if you have initramfs you can remove and reinsert the card at that recovery shell, and type ‘exit’ and it should boot but this doesn’t work on arch based systems it seems and I think its just because its not detecting that slot exists at all.
I’ve also seen super similar issues on this forum as well but the solutions were inconclusive or weren’t my exact problem.
I did see my exact problem on the arch forum but the solution was a rollback commit to the Linux kernel which is either outdated now, or potentially irrelevant to my problem if said change stuck.
I did also notice modules are not loaded yet by the time it kicks me to rootfs, which are needed to continue to access the SD card slot
I can speculate that this is a driver issue or a timing issue, but I’m seriously not sure. I don’t think its a bootloader issue at least, but I’m super lost here.