Hi there,
So the other day i installed ubuntu gnome on my portable external harddrive connected to my laptop because i didnt want to take up space on my laptops HDD. Anyway I used the 'something else' option in the installer (I booted the installer from a USB drive) and i selected my partitions (300GB ext4 and a swap) and chose my external harddrive for the device to install the bootloader onto. It installed and works like a dream, in fact im writing this post on Ubuntu gnome from my external HDD. However every time I boot my laptop up whether my external HDD is connected or not I get this:
The only thing that i have done so far is type "grub> exit" which gives me:
and then takes me to my bios boot menu:
above you can see my boot order. Whats really weird is that when i power on my laptop it will not boot from HDD1 unless I manually select it. What I have been doing is typing "grub> exit" and then selecting HDD1 (all the other options do nothing apart from HDD2: windows) and that takes me to here:
(the Ubuntu bootloader)
and selecting ubuntu boots completely fine:
Why does it boot to the grub terminal everytime i power on (even when the external HDD is disconected)?
This has completely confused me but if any one can help that would be amazing as it would make using linux alot more seamless for me.
Thanks! :)
Your boot loader got messed up during the install.
You could manually try to repair the boot loader, but I do not even know how I would go about doing that.
I can definitely tell you that you wanna back up your windows files just in case you can not get grub anymore.
Would it help if i disconnected my external HDD and then booted on to windows (which i can do, i just select HDD2 in the bios) and tryed to uninstall grub from HDD2 I have no idea why grub would be on HDD2 but considering grub shows up even when the extrnl HDD isnt connected might that be the problem?
Also its funny you say back everything up becasue the external HDD is a Seagate backup plus drive that i have been using to back up windows, but I guess im screwed if anything breaks the backup partition!
Thanks :)
Probably the fact that it is an external drive messed up things while installation. Boot from the live USB on ubuntu and use this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
It should be able to repair grub.
If after the repair you only see the ubuntu partition on the list the just do an "update-grub" in ubuntu terminal and it will be fine.
Thanks, that did something but didnt fix it directly.
I changed my boot order and put USB1-1 first and it seems to work even though it fails to boot from USB1-1 it sends me to the Ubuntu bootloader. I think maybe it was failing to boot before because my external drive had not been loaded/mounted and therefore no bootable media was found. i havent tried without my external HDD connected yet but i will report my findings.
@Tjj226_Angel @turin231 Thanks :)