hi, first of all im so sorry if this has been posted/resolved before, ive been reading forums for hours getting little tips here and there (and learning little by little) but i havnt found anything that accurately represents my situation and im kind of fried and confused from reading everything. but i will say in the few hours ive been using ubuntu im loving it, despite my ignorance and uncertainty with it

so anyway here goes

i have a dell inspiron 1100 laptop, that has windows xp on it. thats kind of irrelevent except to explain my situation

i have a 30 gb external hard drive.

i used my friends dell dimension 2400 desktop (windows xp) to run the ubuntu live cd (because my laptop has issues and the cd rom drive isnt working so i couldnt boot off of that). i wanted to install ubuntu to the external hard drive so i could use it with my laptop.

i correctly partitioned and formatted the external harddrive, but i think i accidentally installed grub to my friends computer, not the external hard drive like i meant to.

when the install was done, i removed the cd, and removed the hard drive, rebooted and i got the grub error 21 code (grub not found). when i plugged the harddrive back in it went to the boot options (ubuntu, ubuntu recovery, windows xp etc)

i figured out how to use command line to make the computer default to windows xp without that menu coming up but it only boots if the external hard drive is plugged in (which isnt always going to be an option) and now im not sure how to get to ubuntu (since it automatically goes to windows xp - though i only tried it once, and it's getting late and im getitng tired and losing focus)

so my questions are:

how do i get grub from the dell dimension to my laptop or to the external hard drive so it will boot off of the hard drive (my bios support usb booting)

how do i make it so my friends computer starts without that error message?

i think i read something about using a windows xp restore cd to restore the master boot record BUT i dont have my friends restore cd's around, and they may not exsist... and all i have for my laptop is the dell restore cd. is there another way? im trying to do this and get it fixed without alerting the friend to possible issues (ie having to ask for the restore discs)

i hope i was clear, and i hope i can be helped. thanks!

Your friends computer had GRUB installed to MBR, so you need to boot windows into rescue mode and "fixboot" to remove it.

You need to install GRUB to the external drive - you can do this from a live CD and grub install commands. Your computer BIOS needs to be set to boot from external drive first, then internal drive. If you don't have that option in BIOS, this ain't gonna work.

Since you have sich a good friend, you should see if you can borrow that working CD drive...