Hi

I have a problem that i would really like to get some help with. I currently had debian 3.1 and winXP installed, but yesterday i wanted to try ubuntu 5.10 because i heard some nice things about it in a magazine. Since i dont have any space on my internal harddrive for ubuntu i had to use an external harddrive. I plugged in the external harddrive and booted the system with the DVD for ubuntu. I installed ubuntu on the external harddrive and booted. Everything looked fine, but i wanted to remove ubuntu, because it didnt see the partition which i installed it on in the installation of ubuntu. Should be easy just removing ubuntu, but no.

I first booted without the external harddrive which resulted to a grub error of code 21. I then simply removed the partitions on the external harddrive and ubuntu should be gone. I then booted up with no need of the external harddrive and then i got a grub error code of 22. The grub bootloader was installed on the MBR of the internal harddrive and not the external. The only way i could get into my debian system now was to reinstall ubuntu on the external harddrive so the grub screen wouldnt display the error message. I didnt have a debian rescue disc and i saw that there were no rescue tools on my debian installation CD, so i reinstalled ubuntu.

Now when i reinstalled ubuntu i could boot, but i had to have the external harddrive plugged in, because if it wasnt i got error code 21 from grub. So, i thought, how about going into debian and then remove the partitions for the ubuntu installation and then update the grub bootloader which should work. I updated the bootloader with "update-grub" and it should be fine. I didnt see ubuntu in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, so it shouldnt be any problems when i now had updated grub and removed ubuntu. I rebooted and i still got grub error code 22 and i really dont know now how to get rid of ubuntu so i dont have to boot with the external harddrive plugged in every time i have to start any system. I installed ubuntu again (irritating of course) and now i have it only to be able to boot into debian and winXP.

Is there someone who could help me with this problem ? I would really appericiate help to this problem.

You should run grub-install /dev/hda from within Debian - assuming you have IDE - to get your independence back again

Hmm, ok ill try that. The other device (the external harddrive is seen as a scsi device, but the internal harddrive is IDE). The debian installation is installed in the IDE and the ubunut is installed on the scsi disc.

Thanks Emerson, it worked.