I have managed to get a system going where I have kubuntu installed on a partition of my external hard drive. When the ehd is plugged in, everything works well. I have the option to boot into vista (my main os) or kubuntu. However, I see no reason why it won't let me have some kind of fallback mechanism that would let me boot into vista if the ehd is not found, instead I end up with the grub rescue prompt.

If not then I'm going to have to look at other options, perhaps booting into vista by default unless I hold down escape or whatever other key my bios expects to override, because there will be times that my ehd won't be plugged in.

This is the only little niggle, as apart from that everything is working great.

Mat

Your problem is that you didn't think this through before you installed Linux. You could easily have achieved your desired result if you had put the GRUB on the external HD and left the Windows boot loader on the internal disk. Then you should have set your motherboard boot sequence to use the external disk before the internal disk. Had you done that then you would now have the behavior that you desire.

You could still achieve that with very little effort if you have the Vista installation disk. You could boot Linux, install GRUB on the external disk, then use the Vista recovery console to restore a Windows boot loader on the internal disk. Then just change the boot device sequence on the motherboard.

I see what you mean now, and that makes sense. Thanks for the help