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I recently needed to use ubuntu for my project, so instead of dual booting ubuntu along windows I wanted to boot from external SSD to have the project portable. I installed ubuntu on a pen drive and made it bootable. I installed ubuntu on San disk SSD from pen drive using my friends laptop. However when I tried to boot the SSD from my laptop going to BIOS bootloader and after selecting SSD,I keep getting Minimal BASH - like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB lists possible command completions. Anywhere else TAB Lists possible device or file completions. It worked perfectly fine while i connected the SSD to my friend laptop, ubuntu loaded perfectly I was able to download arduino and ROS softwares as well and run smoothly, my friends laptop is also HP but may be 6 to 8 years old, mine is also HP but pavilion i7 4 years old.

I checked many forums online they suggested to check for grub partition but it does'nt show any grub partition when I type command "ls" I tried sudo update grub but error says " cant find command 'sudo'. I tried doing everything from the beginning by formatting both pen drive and SSD thinking something might be corrupted but everytime same problem, when i tried for manually partitioning I got var file not readable. I redid it again but after booting up Minimal BASH error keeps coming up in my laptop, Is it hardware issue or is it booting configuration issue on my laptop, now my friend the laptop few days so I was wondering if some settings need to reseted ??? I cant figure out the problem, Any help would be appreciated.

Joe
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    You've tagged your Ubuntu release as being Ubuntu 14.04 (the 2014-April release), is that correct? That product is very old & reached its end of standard support back in 2019.. Are you sure that's what you're using? – guiverc Feb 26 '24 at 01:46
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    Your details are unclear; and your release does matter. Grub is installed in a directory /boot/grub which is not on a separate partition by default (as its not required) unless it was specifically created during install. How your system boots will be determined by your hardware, legacy BIOS/CSM machines use a MBR (reserved sector since 1982 on all disk) that is outside of the partitioning space that loads from the partition (pointer in the 512 byte sector).. OR it'll boot using uEFI using the ESP (EFI System Partition)... There is no GRUB partition; its just software. – guiverc Feb 26 '24 at 01:49
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    If your and your friends machine boot differently (this will mostly be controlled by machine firmware settings; ie. uEFI/BIOS settings) its possible the drive may boot on one machine & not the other.. You gave no details as to the hardware involved (settings matter most; not just age of hardware), let alone what Ubuntu product, how it was installed etc (just a vague clue that is was an unsupported product of 14.04 which won't boot on modern hardware due to revoked keys!) You control boot/no-boot by BIOS setting with regards revoked keys.. newer hardware has higher-security defaults – guiverc Feb 26 '24 at 01:52
  • Boot order? Does the UEFI/BIOS setting match the installation? Is the SSD set to ACHI/RAID/SATA/NVMe? – Daniel T Feb 26 '24 at 03:00
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    If you did an UEFI install, you have to have an ESP - efi system partition on the externals drive. Depending on version of Ubuntu, it defaults to installing grub to ESP on internal drive. So you friends system probably has the boot files you need. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1296065/dual-booting-w10-ubuntu-with-2-separate-ssds-in-uefi-mode/1296153#1296153 If you can access friends system, add ESP to external drive FAT32 with boot,esp flags. Change fstab to have that ESP's UUID & totally reinstall grub. You do not then boot "ubuntu" but boot like installer or drive entry. – oldfred Feb 26 '24 at 14:45

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