Hi all,

I was planning on starting my Linux era with Ubuntu 9.10. Installed it from CD on an 8GB USB drive. Set BIOS to boot from said USB drive before built-in hard drive.

If I switch on computer (acer Aspire laptop), it will ignore USB drive and boot Win Vista from hard disk.

If I force computer to try and boot from USB via the BIOS boot menu, it says: No Operating System found. Why? How can I convince it that there actually is an operating system installed?

I consciously did not install grub boot manager because when I tried Ubuntu installation + grub yesterday, nothing booted anymore: Grub said NO SUCH DRIVE and I couldn't even boot windows anymore without some hassle.

Will I forever be unable to run Ubuntu on this computer? Anything I can do?

Thanks in advance for your help.