Unable to boot ubuntu 11.10 from external usb drive

Question

I'm new to Ubuntu (and actually all things Linux) as of this morning, so please excuse any stupid mistakes I may be making. I recently bought an external hard drive for my newly built PC (that is running windows 7 if it matters). I would like to install Ubuntu onto the external drive and boot from there. I downloaded Ubuntu 11.10 and made a bootable cd, unplugged my internal HDDs, plugged in the external drive, installed Ubuntu 11.10 on the external drive via the installer, and replugged in my internal HDDs. Then I set my bios boot order to: Boot from USB-HDD - Boot from Hard Disk - Boot from CD/DVD. Now when I restart I get the message "Starting Operating System..." (or something like that, I forget exactly what it says) that lingers on the screen for a moment and then windows starts. Any idea what the problem may be?

~Relevant info~ BIOS version: Award Software International, Inc. F2, 2/22/2011 Ubuntu Version: 11.10 External Hard Drive: Western Digital My Passport Essential 500GB Portable Hard Drive (Black)

~Things I've already tried~ 1) Unplug internal HDDs so that only external drive was plugged in via usb. Same thing happened only obviously my BIOS could not detect any hard drives besides the external one. When booting received error "Could not detect operating system"

2) Formatted external hard drive and re installed. It didn't make a difference, however interestingly when I booted from cd the ubuntu installer said it detected ubuntu 11.10 on the external hard drive.

3) Within BIOS I've messed around with every boot order combo I could think of both in the "Hard Disk boot order" screen and the "Boot order" screen. I'm a little confused of why there are two screens for this.

4) Held F12 during startup which opens (what I think is) the one time boot screen and it gave me the options "Hard Drive", "cd/dvd", "USB-FDD", "USB-cdrom", "USB-HDD", and "USB-something else I can't remember what it was". I tried all of them, but the same thing as before happened each time.

~References~ I noticed several people on askubuntu have tried to do something similar if not the exact same. In fact, I even found a post that pretty much outlines step by step exactly what I did... only their's worked. /jealous. Linky: Install Ubuntu or Kubuntu on a External USB Drive

I'm willing to try a different version of ubuntu - it's not like my heart is set on 11.10, but it's a pain to open my case and unplug my internal hard drives so I'd prefer not to do this unless someone is reasonably confident it'll work.

Thank you for all of your help in advance! I'm really looking forward to exploring Ubuntu!

Answer 1

I think since you unplugged the internal hard drive during install the bootloader was installed on the external USB hard drive.

So, the only way to boot after starting the computer is to hit the function key to get a boot menu from the Windows boot loader, e.g. F12. Then, select the USB hard drive. You should see the GRUB selection screen (the linux boot loader) where you can boot into Linux, into rescue mode, etc.

I found that on Ubuntu 11.10 on a USB hard drive I can only boot into rescue mode (not normal mode), log in with my root password, hit Ctrl + D to exit, then the booting continues to the login screen.

I think on my laptop the issue is that the graphics switching just after Grub starts the boot (to get into the splash screen) somehow fails, so the rescue mode works because it boots with the same mode GRUB uses. Once the USB disks are initialized X can be started, apparently.