problem with GRUB

[Derek Broughton]

Naja Melan wrote:

> I am new to linux (oh no, not another one, oh yes...;), and i  ran into
> some troubles. My configuration is as follows.

Really, despite some recent noise, we don't mind helping newies :-)

> After trying the live cd of Kubuntu, and liking it, i wanted to install it
> on a disk so i could boot it without the cd. I thought it would be nice to
> put it on my portable hd (ext usb), 

That's nice, and it's possible, but it _does_ offer a few potential
problems.

> At the last screen i saw a button advanced... and pressed it. it said
> something like "Grub help goes here..." 

That's unfortunate... 

> and a text field reading (hd0) 
> unfortunately none of the disks had ever been called hd0 in the wizard so
> far, 

Grub uses its own naming scheme, so even though the hard drive would likely
be named sdb to linux, grub would probably call it (hd1).  Your internal
drive is going to be /dev/sda or /dev/hda to Linux and (hd0) to grub. 
Specifying (hd0) for grub says to install the boot loader on the master
boot record of the internal drive.  (hd1) would be the MBR of the external
drive.

> so i didn't really dare to change it, however thinking that would not 
> leave my portable disk bootable. It turned out that it didn't manage to
> boot anyway. I cant remember exactly what happend, but none of my three
> discs booted to kubuntu, so i did everything over changing the value to
> (sda) how the wizard called my external hd. This gave a fatal error upon
> installing grub, so i didn't bother testing it and then tried again with
> (hd2).

Doh!  Why'd you skip hd1? :-)

You're on the right track.
-- 
derek