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Okay so a few months back I bought a new HDD for my laptop and installed Windows 8.1 onto the new HDD in place of the old HDD, I then bought a caddy to use my old HDD in place of my DVD drive seeing as I rarely use it nowadays, and installed Ubuntu on there.

I managed to set up a GRUB boot menu that lets me choose between the two operating systems, I cannot remember specifically how I did this.

Anyway the inevitable day has come that I want to watch a DVD and what I have found is that when I remove my caddy with Ubuntu on I cannot boot into Windows, and swapping the HDD's around I cannot boot into Ubuntu either!

I booted into a USB live disc of Ubuntu and tried to edit the grub settings, after installing grub and running "find /boot/grub/stage1" gives me an error "no files found".

I also tried booting into windows recovery USB disc to restore original windows boot system but running boot recovery fails every time!

I can only boot when both HDDs are present, I would like to be able to boot into windows when my HDD caddy is not inserted, and boot into a grub menu when it is inserted can anyone help me?

Thanks for your time

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2 Answers 2

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Assuming this is a non-UEFI machine, with MSDOS partitioning, you need to install grub with all its files onto the first HDD, and that should be able to boot either HDD, and still run if the caddy is absent. If you have a (small) FAT partition on the first disk, you can install grub to that partition (the grub files), and have grub in the MBR for booting. This FAT/grub has worked for me after I had wiped out the Windows MBR.

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My advice would be to have both windows and ubuntu installed on the same primary drive, because when you remove the drive there will be no bootloader. I tried the same and since my laptop bios was slightly old i could only boot into ubuntu.

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