Installing Ubuntu on external USB HD

[Michael Moore]

A friend of mine went to the install fest a few weekends ago, and got
help putting Ubuntu on his exteranal HD. When he installed XP, it
wiped the MBR, so Ubuntu doesn't boot any more.

He wants the MBR on his external HD, so he can plug it into any
computer that can boot USB and it will just work.

I was able to get grub to install to the MBR, but I wasn't able to
configure grub properly to boot Ubuntu. We keep getting Grub error 22.

Does anyone know how to configure this, or know of a good tutorial?

Here's what I was trying
Booted live CD
mount -o bind /dev /media/usbdisk/dev
mount -t proc proc /media/usbdisk/proc
chroot /media/usbdisk
<<Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst such that it points to hd0,0 as the root partition.>>
<<Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules such that USB related modules are
included in the ram disk>>
<<make initrd -- mkinitramfs /boot/initrd.kernelnumber /path/to/kernel/modules>>
grub-install hd1
exit chroot
reboot and select boot from USB from the BIOS list

Perhaps my confusion is in how Grub names devices. When booted from
the live CD, the internal HD gets hd0, the external HD gets hd1. I
thought that when booting Grub always assigned the boot device to hd0.

Thanks,
-- 
Michael Moore
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