I've created a bootable backup of my Ubuntu to an external USB hard drive. I can now boot to my external backup from grub when grub is loaded from my internal hard drive, but I cannot boot to grub on the external hard drive. After telling my PC BIOS to boot from USB, I just get the message "Reboot and select proper boot device". The external USB hard drive is a "WD My Passport Ultra 1TB drive".
Here's the steps I've taken to get this far:
- Deleted and recreated the msdos partition table on the external drive.
Created partitions as follows..
Model: WD My Passport 0820 (scsi) Disk /dev/sdb: 1000GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 1049kB 483GB 483GB primary ext3 boot 2 483GB 698GB 215GB primary fat32 3 698GB 1000GB 302GB primary ntfs
which results in this:
Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000170586112 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121597 cylinders, total 1953458176 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00019d8c Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 2048 943720447 471859200 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 943720448 1363150847 209715200 b W95 FAT32 /dev/sdb3 1363150848 1953458175 295153664 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
The second and third partitions are for other, non-Linux, backups.
Used rsync to copy my entire Ubuntu, from the root on down, to the external drive on /dev/hdb1 (my Ubuntu backup partition), largely using this as my guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Full_system_backup_with_rsync
Modified the backup's /etc/fstab (i.e. /media/LinuxBackup/etc/fstab where /media/LinuxBackup is the mount point for /dev/sdb1) to have just two entries:
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 UUID=ba0ad23c-1625-4dbf-ae50-0e4e68f469a6 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
where the above UUID is the UUID of /dev/sdb1.
In the internal drive's Ubuntu partition (/dev/hda7), I modified /boot/grub/menu.lst to include the following entry:
title USB BOOT, Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS, kernel 3.2.0-67-generic uuid ba0ad23c-1625-4dbf-ae50-0e4e68f469a6 kernel /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-67-generic root=UUID=ba0ad23c-1625-4dbf-ae50-0e4e68f469a6 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-67-generic quiet
I rebooted and selected the above entry and successfully booted into Ubuntu off of the external hard drive. I confirmed this by checking that /dev/sdb1 is mounted as / (rather than /dev/sda7, as it is when booting from the internal drive).
I attempted to load grub into the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the external hard drive by running:
# sudo grub-install /dev/sdb
This ran successfully.
I rebooted, changed my PC BIOS to boot only from USB, expecting grub to appear, but instead got "Reboot and select proper boot device", making it seem as though grub is not on the external drive.
I'm now at a bit of a loss. Could this be a problem with my motherboard's BIOS or with My Passport Ultra?