bazbazbaz
December 21st, 2008, 04:12 AM
Hi,
I have searched far and wide and have not found a solution to my specific problem, even though lots of posts have come real close.
First, here is my goal: I want to install Ubuntu on my external 750gb usb drive and leave Vista on my internal 120gb laptop HD AND for Ubuntu to load only when my external drive is plugged in and on, but Vista to load when my external drive is unplugged or off. I don't want Vista or its partition to have any concept whatsoever of my external drive or grub. I don't want to choose Vista from some sort of boot list or anything like that.
Here is where I got: I successfully install Mint 6 on my external drive and made sure to switch grub's location in "advanced" during the install to "sdc" (i think) rather than the default "sd0" (i think). When I rebooted, things didn't work perfectly, there was a grub "error 17 partition not found" but I fixed it by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst and now I am happily typing this from my future primary OS - Mint!
The problem: When my external HD is unplugged Vista does not load and I only get the word "GRUB" on a black screen. There are no options or any keys to type, all I can do is ctrl+alt+delete to reboot. Now what is strange is that I specifically told grub to be on my external hd. Why is it showing up on my internal disk at all? I really wanted my internal disk to remain untouched and oblivious to what I was doing.
Thoughts: I think I need to restore my Vista MBR. I tried booting from the Vista CD and choosing the option to fix boot (or something like that) but that didn't solve it, and I can't seem to run commands such as fdisk /mbr or fixmbr off of the vista command-line.
What do you suggest?
Thank you very much!
I have searched far and wide and have not found a solution to my specific problem, even though lots of posts have come real close.
First, here is my goal: I want to install Ubuntu on my external 750gb usb drive and leave Vista on my internal 120gb laptop HD AND for Ubuntu to load only when my external drive is plugged in and on, but Vista to load when my external drive is unplugged or off. I don't want Vista or its partition to have any concept whatsoever of my external drive or grub. I don't want to choose Vista from some sort of boot list or anything like that.
Here is where I got: I successfully install Mint 6 on my external drive and made sure to switch grub's location in "advanced" during the install to "sdc" (i think) rather than the default "sd0" (i think). When I rebooted, things didn't work perfectly, there was a grub "error 17 partition not found" but I fixed it by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst and now I am happily typing this from my future primary OS - Mint!
The problem: When my external HD is unplugged Vista does not load and I only get the word "GRUB" on a black screen. There are no options or any keys to type, all I can do is ctrl+alt+delete to reboot. Now what is strange is that I specifically told grub to be on my external hd. Why is it showing up on my internal disk at all? I really wanted my internal disk to remain untouched and oblivious to what I was doing.
Thoughts: I think I need to restore my Vista MBR. I tried booting from the Vista CD and choosing the option to fix boot (or something like that) but that didn't solve it, and I can't seem to run commands such as fdisk /mbr or fixmbr off of the vista command-line.
What do you suggest?
Thank you very much!