I’ve got an older laptop that won’t boot from an SD card bigger than 4GB. I would think that a current device wouldn’t have that problem, but who knows.
Your trials and tribulations remind me of putting Cyanogenmod firmware on my B&N Nook Color, trying to make a cheap tablet. I did finally beat it into submission, but it was a frustrating process.
I have been using Win32ImageWriter which I have used successfully in the past for other things. I know it can boot off of SD as that is how it was made, it checks the SD card slot for a OS first and then if there isn't one it boots into Android. I doubt it is a hardware problem as I can see files/save files to SD cards if I put them in there. I'll try to find another copy of Win32ImageWriter though.
Head over to rikomagic. He has lubuntu that is optimised for the mk802. Ran well with the motorola lapdock until my 10 month old got his hands on it. Broke the hdmi connector. :_(
OK, let’s forget about problems with the Mk802 itself.
I downloaded one of the images (Puppy for the Mele) and wrote it to an SD card. The resulting card looks like a traditional MBR partitioned hard disk, with two partitions. The first is a 16MB FAT32 partition. It has a few *.bin files, and a uImage file that is probably the Linux kernel. The second partition is 3.7GB formatted as EXT4, and is a Linux root file system (directories /bin, /dev, /etc, /lib, /usr, and so forth).
If you have a Linux system, you could check your card to see if it resembles the above. If you have a Windows system, you would only be able to see the first partition.
Ok, just tried the suggestion from another forum which also didn't work so now Unetbootin is burning a copy of puppy linux onto it. After that I think I will try Lubuntu using Unetbootin.
Ok, just tried Puppy Linux when made via Unetbootin, that also did not work. It just booted straight into Android. Testing Lubuntu via Unetbootin right now.