Hey everyone- I made a post about this incident on the Ubuntu forum, but I have a related more general question.

My mom's computer was running Win XP really slowly, and a boot time scan revealed she had WIN 32 CTX. Even after reparing it it was still very slow (starting up FF/Opera took about 20 seconds).

I bought an External HD and downloaded Ubuntu. I ran the live disk and it recognized the external HD. I ran the installer to point to the External because I wanted to create a dual boot and not lose any data on the Windows side (mostly iTunes files).

The installer ran and gave no errors. After restarting the computer however GRUB gets to stage 1.5 and gives an Error 18. I can't boot into either OS.

In talking to people at work, apparently it's pretty difficult to install Linux to an external.

So what do I have to do differently to install to the external? It's important I don't lose anything on the internal drive and resizing the partitions there is not really an option. Is there a way I can tell GRUB to load the Linux Kernel on the external?

If that's not possible, should I simply be able to repair the MBR with a Windows disk and everything be back to it's slow but functional self, or do I have to somehow tell GRUB to load the Windows partition, and if so, how do I do that?

Thanks for any help!

You should work your way from the bottom-up to resolve the problem (re: not being able to install linux on an external HDD). You can install linux to an external HDD and use grub as the boot loader.

Thing to check before actually modifying grub or installing the OS:

--make sure the bios/motherboard actually supports booting from the external device