Hello

I'm a little puzzled. I have a Toshiba usb harddisk wit Ubuntu 8.10. When I plug it into my Dell laptop, it boots Ubuntu from the Toshiba harddisk.

When I plug the same HD into my desktop, it doesn't boot from the external HD. But when I plug an old USB stick with DSL into the same desktop, it boots from the USB stick.

Conclussion:
- the HD is bootable, otherwise the laptop wouldn't boot from it
- the desktop can boot from USB, otherwise it wouldn't boot from the USB stick

What could be wrong? How do I get the desktop to boot from the HD?

Bye

Koen Plessers

Hi,

fire up your desktop with your external HDD connected, go to BIOS and check the settings. BIOS may save its settings so it always looks for the USB stick to boot from, because it remembers its name. But it's not configured to boot from your HDD. Just check out your BIOS settings with that HDD connected.

Dr. Eddy

Hello

That's one of the things I tried. Got a GRUB error.

Koen Plessers

The grub is the error.

You have different drives or the drives are being named differently. Grub is working so you have booted to the drive. (unless you mean grub is on the local drive) In either case you have to either find the correct drive and type it in or re-edit grub config to choose the computers.

Bios is still a choice too. There tend to be many options that might affect usb.

Hello

I had some time to continue my experiments. Bearing in mind that GRUB is the error, I used good old LILO. And guess what... it works.

Bye

Koen Plessers