[Glastonbury] Booting from external drive

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2005 at 09:48:01AM +0100, Sean Miller wrote:
> 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.

Have you tried using various options from the command line in grub?

> 
> 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.
> 
The configuration on the _external_  drive hasn't changed at all.

If your old laptop died, are you sure the drive you took out was
actually OK. Do you know that it spins up etc.? Could whatever fried
your old laptop have nobbled the partition table?

> 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).
> 
External drive _will_ boot to itself, if it hasn't been modified,
surely? [Plug it internally to your new laptop and it would probably
work immediately]

> 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)
> 
Change your BIOS settings to not boot from external USB device

Boot Kubuntu Live / Knoppix DVD and use the tools on those to
amend the grub on the external hard disk. / install a complete new
bootloader.

Then change your BIOS settings back :) 

Alternatively, use the external housing/use a laptop drive to standard drive 
adaptor for a few moments, plug in the laptop drive as slave in a standard PC
- boot into XP, use XP transfer wizard to copy the settings across to
  the new laptop plus any data on the old disk so it's in your new XP.

  Tar up any data under Linux and copy it off.
  
  Nuke the old drive and reinstall Linux on it from scratch: Debian /
  Kubuntu 5.10

  Andy
  
> Any help gratefully received.
> 
> Sean
> 
> 
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