[Glastonbury] Booting from external drive

[Sean Miller]

My old laptop fried a couple of weeks back and I now have a new one.

Now, I have turned the hard drive of the original into an external USB 
drive and I notice that the new laptop tries to boot from it if it is 
plugged in. It fails, just hangs on grub for obvious reasons.

So, what I'd like to do is modify the external so that it boots into the 
linux partition on itself... at present, presumably the master boot 
record on the external drive tells grub to look on the linux partition 
for its config... the physical location of that partition has presumably 
changed so the reason that grub is hanging is that's looking on the new 
laptop's hard drive for grub info and - of course - because there is 
nothing there it can go no further.

I'd like to be able to boot into my old Linux so would welcome any help 
anybody could give as to what I need to do to make the external drive 
boot to itself and, furthermore, to the Linux rather then XP partition 
(though dual-boot is fine is that is how it happens).

I'd like to leave the MBR on the new laptop's harddrive as is if 
possible, so if the USB drive is plugged in we get Linux and if it is 
not we get Windows (which the wife & daughter like)

Any help gratefully received.

Sean