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I'm trying to get my old HP pc to boot my external HD Ubuntu install.

External HD Partition Table

The PC boots in BIOS.

Can anyone see any obvious problems with how I have this partition table setup?

It's a PC from around 2006. The internal HD currently runs Lubuntu.

Ideally I would love to have an Ubuntu install on my external drive that works with modern computers as well as this old one.

There are a lot of tutorials related to this online but no definitive answers.

Thalia Mitford
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  • No obvious problems but it is a UEFI mode installation - probably - beacuse it has an EFI partition. It won't boot in BIOS only computers. – ChanganAuto Jun 06 '21 at 16:51
  • Right. So basically need a seperate Ubuntu install on another drive if I want to use it on this old computer. – Thalia Mitford Jun 06 '21 at 16:55
  • Not necessarily. If the drive is GPT then a small partition for the old bootloader can be created and then it should boot in any system. But of course that should have been done before actually installing Ubuntu. – ChanganAuto Jun 06 '21 at 16:59
  • Since you're booting it in BIOS mode, do you have a MBR on the drive? The MBR cannot be in a partition (as a GPT/MBR compatible partition scheme will not use that space; space is allocated beyond MBR so as to not clobber it). If your intention for sdb1 was to provide the MBR; you've misunderstood what MBR is; the first 512 bytes of disk surface). Does your old HP boot from the drive; some old dell/hp models will only boot if a single drive/memory device is plugged in (no capacity in BIOS to ask which to boot) so if another USB device has ram/rom/storage available none will boot. – guiverc Jun 06 '21 at 22:26
  • No idea. Those partitions were automatically created for me when I installed Ubuntu. Will keep Googling. – Thalia Mitford Jun 06 '21 at 23:07
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    Your partition setup looks like it should work with either a gpt or msdos partitioned disk, but your old computer may boot only msdos disks. A legacy/BIOS install should work, avoiding the launchpad bug 1396379 for UEFI systems. – ubfan1 Jun 07 '21 at 04:11
  • You can use the advice in this link, and the simple solution with a pre-installed image or make the system yourself along the guidelines of this link. Please be aware that some 'middle-aged' HP computers refuse to boot in BIOS mode (alias CSM alias legacy mode) via grub when there is a GUID partition table (GPT), but they are willing to boot when there is an MSDOS partition table (as indicated by ubfan1). – sudodus Jun 07 '21 at 06:28
  • There are also good instructions by @C.S.Cameron at this link – sudodus Jun 07 '21 at 06:31
  • Followed these instructions by @C.S.Cameron multiple times but still boots into Lubuntu (on main drive) and never see Ubuntu install. – Thalia Mitford Jun 10 '21 at 20:08

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