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I have recently installed ubuntu on a 1TB external hard drive, without any special partitioning, I used the express partitioning setting in the installation. Everything worked just fine as I was able to boot from the external hard drive and use ubuntu, and when I unplugged the hard drive from the computer it couldn't boot of course.

The problem is, when I plug the hard drive to another computer, and I have tried 3 different computers, they won't boot from it even when I change the boot order correctly in the BIOS, or I get a "no operating system" error.

I would really appreciate any help. Thank you !

Lir
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    Make sure GRUB, Ubuntu's bootloader is installed in the external hard drive, not the internal one where the installation was done. See http://askubuntu.com/questions/180023/can-i-install-grub-on-an-usb-and-make-it-a-rescue-disk for instructions. – user68186 Aug 12 '15 at 11:39
  • @user68186 Thank you for your comment. I had a hard time following the instructions on that link. Could you please explain specifically how I can install grub on the external hard drive using another computer / live cd? That would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance. – Lir Aug 12 '15 at 11:57

2 Answers2

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for a generic question like yours you can simply reinstall grub on your HDD.

use a Ubuntu Live CD or USB, plug your hard drive and open a terminal. Mount the partition where you installed Ubuntu, for example, if the hard drive is on sdb:

sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt

after that, do a simply reinstall grub on the MBR's hard drive:

sudo grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/boot /dev/sdb
AlexGreg
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  • So you mean to say that the bootloader for example should be installed in sdX (where x can be a,b,c or other letters) signifying the external hard drive instead of the partition inside the hard disk (sdX1, sdX2, sdX3... so on) ?? Am I correct in this reasoning? – ghostanime2001 Aug 04 '22 at 17:55
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What I ended up doing is using "Something Else" option while re-installing ubuntu on the hard drive, (from a live CD or installation disk) and specifying the boot manager location to be sdX (the external hard drive itself).

I guess that by installing ubuntu with express partitioning settings the boot manager was either placed on the wrong disk or on one of the disk's partitions. (sdX1 for example.)

Lir
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