(total noob here...)

I have a Dell Inspiron 700m with a Fujitsu 60 GB HDD running XP Pro SP2. Recently I bought a Western Digital 320 GB My Book and decided to look into installing a Linux distro on it.

I downloaded Ubuntu 6.10, launched the live CD, and found that it recognized the external HDD. So I followed the Install prompts, making sure to select "/dev/sda: SCSI1 320 GB WD External" instead of "/dev/hda IDE1 master Fujitsu MHV2060AH" and telling it to erase the entire disk instead of making any partitions, and it appeared to install properly.

When I rebooted and tried to boot to the WD external HDD, it gave me an error message of "Missing Loader." Worse, when I tried to boot to the untouched Fujitsu HDD, it tries to load the GRUB and gives me either an Error 17 or Error 21.

At first I nearly crapped my pants thinking I'd accidentally reformatted my primary HDD. But I launched the live CD again and went into the partitioner and found that the Fujitsu HDD appears untouched (NTFS filesystem, 28.5 GB used, etc). Also, the external HDD now has 6.42 GB used and a 2.84 GB swap partition where these didn't exist before.

I'd definitely like to get Ubuntu running someday, but more importantly I need that crummy Windows HDD for work tomorrow, so if anyone knows how to get my computer to boot Windows again, I'd appreciate it. I'll be happy to post any additional information you need

Boot with your windows disk (or any dos boot disk) and type fixmbr for 2000/XP or fdisk /mbr (98/ME bootdisk). This will restore NTLDR for windows.

If I remember correctly, you can't just install to an external drive without doing some work. The grub error is that you put the bootloader on your Inspiron HDD MBR, but all the config files are on the external drive and it doesn't know how to read that drive until you load linux. So you sort of have a chicken and an egg problem, I think. If I remember correctly, the trick is to make a small partition (~100MB) on your Inspiron HDD for the /boot directory, that way you can load the kernel from the HDD and then it can get everything else from the external drive.

Note I'm sort of speculating, google will probably be able to give you more insight...

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=80811
http://frontier05.blogspot.com/2006/...ernal-usb.html

Slight update: for Win2k/XP, you boot the CD, then hit the <r> key (as the splash message says) to get into Recovery console.
Then run fixmbr. This should allow you to boot XP again o.k.

As for the real problem, I'd be surprised if you still needed to add USB support to the initrd on Edgy, although I haven't tried an install like this. Those guides are a bit old now.
Simple solution for you next time might be to set the USB drive as the BIOS boot drive prior to (re-)installing Ubuntu. Hopefully then it will update the MBR on it. Then if you still have problems you can simply switch back and use the XP loader on the internal.

Thanks for your help getting XP back; fixmdr worked beautifully. I'll try out your suggestions for the external HDD tomorrow.