Boot Late 2010 MacBook Air from SD Card

I have a late 2010 MacBook Air (13 inch) and would absolutely love to be able to boot it from my SD Card on which I have Puppy Linux installed. I use Puppy Linux on an old HP Mini 2133 netbook and I'd like to have the option to use it occasionally on my Air as well. However, I've attempted in the past to install ReFIt and had no luck going that route. So, my question is: is it possible to simply boot from the SD card without installing additional software? I very much prefer to keep my Air as stock as possible - I currently only have about 8 or 9 3rd party apps installed so if it's possible to do it without ReFIt that would be awesome. Still, if ReFIt is necessary I'm more than happy to give it a try but, as I said, I've attempted it in the past and, upon rebooting, seen no evidence that it was installed (other than the files on my system).

*note - I'm not trying to install Puppy Linux to the drive, I'd just like to be able to boot from it.

Solution 1:

Have you tried this tutorial or Puppy Linux official tutorial (page 21)?

You don't have to burn Puppy Linux to real CD, just repeat all installation process inside VirtualBox. Don't forget to connect your flash drive inside a virtual machine.

As a second option you can try installing rEFInd Boot Manager by Roderick W. Smith instead of rEFIt. rEFIt which seems to be abandoned.

Here is installation guide for rEFInd: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html#osx