Greetings,
My coworker let me have his old laptop with win7 on it.
I attempted to load SUSE 12 onto an ext 80 GB drive.
NOW whenever I try to start the laptop, I get 1 of 2 items.
(1) if the ext drive is NOT plugged in a msg says cant find boot drive and then goes to GRUB RECOVERY.
(only exit is to re-boot)
(2) I get the SUSE loader to select SUSE or Win
(suse goes to a full white screen with a small green square in the center.

My windows system - on my two computers cannot 'see' this ext drive - maybe because it's a linux drive now ??

I want to remove LINUX, get my ext drive back, and NOT foul-up my windows install.
( my coworker has left the company and I never received any ! discs - to replace my WinOS. )

- Please advise !!
- ps , I'm looking on YouTube for demo's, but since I'm registered at LinuxQuestions, I thought I'd try this 'new' forum first.

tnx.

You most likely have installed the Grub bootloader to the internal disk, but the second stage of the bootloader resides on the external disk, which leads to your situation that you can boot only with the external disk attached.
To fix this attach the disk, boot into your Windows system and start a command shell as Administrator (open the start menu, type cmd into the search bar and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter, then answer the UAC question with yes). Type in the command Now the system should be able to boot without the external disk attached.
To make the disk usable for Windows again just use the Windows partition manager to remove the Linux partitions and create and format NTFS partitions.