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I have an empty external hard drive (EHDD) and a usb stick with the ubuntu installation. I want to boot from the usb stick and install ubuntu on the EHDD but be able to unplug the EHDD and boot windows 10 like I normally do.

The problem comes from something I read about installing ubuntu on a device with UEFI, which I know my device has. This is the article

https://www.dionysopoulos.me/portable-ubuntu-on-usb-hdd/

This is the relevant bit

Unfortunately the Ubuntu Installer assumes that you want a dual booting configuration alongside Windows. Therefore it adds itself (actually, the bootloader it uses, GRUB2) to your computer’s UEFI configuration. This causes two problems. For starters, the external HDD is not portable as you cannot boot with it on another computer. Secondly, if you remove this external HDD your Windows won’t boot. Bummer. We have to fix that.

I don't know if this part of the article applies to my situation.

I am not sure if the grub installation would edit my UEFI settings. this is because my sata controller is currently set to the AHCI setting, so the ubuntu installation usb stick can't even see my internal SSD.

Hopefully I can figure out if I will still be able to boot from windows 10 normally.

Zubair Ahmed
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  • UEFI settings are kept in NVRAM, not on the hard disk. Most computers offer a boot setup screen in their EFI user interace which allows you to delete any unwanted boot option. – AlexP Oct 12 '19 at 05:48
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    If you can unplug, disconnect or disable the internal drive, the computer will 'see' your external HDD as the 'first' drive and install the boot structure into it (both in UEFI and BIOS mode). See the details in this link. – sudodus Oct 12 '19 at 09:53
  • So I have no way to unplug my internal drive because I have a laptop. but the other posts said "the ubuntu installer uses the first EFI partition it sees, which is the one on the internal drive" but currently the ubuntu installer cannot see my internal drive because it is in ahci mode. so does that mean that it will not use the internal drive EFI partition and instead only use the external drive? – Zubair Ahmed Oct 12 '19 at 16:22
  • @sudodus So basically the main part of my question is. If the ubuntu installer cannot see my internal ssd because of my AHCI setting, is that essentially the same as having my internal SSD unplugged. Because if that is the case then I shouldn't have a problem with installation. – Zubair Ahmed Oct 12 '19 at 16:43
  • I think Ubuntu likes the AHCI setting, and can see it. But it is possible to unplug the internal drive in most laptops (sometimes easy, sometimes more difficult). And sometimes it is possible to disable it in an UEFI/BIOS menu (or set it so that Ubuntu won't see it. So it is worth trying that way. – sudodus Oct 12 '19 at 16:51
  • @sudodus When I boot from the ubuntu installation usb stick I have tried to run gparted and It cannot see the internal SSD. But I will also try to disable it from the bios. – Zubair Ahmed Oct 12 '19 at 16:54

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