Help

[Ian Weisser]

On Sat, 2012-03-17 at 10:42 -0500, Rick Schwai wrote:

> I installed Ubuntu after downloading to a DVD per instructions. I did
> not use the windows installer as I should have. Ubuntu was installed
> to the portable drive. When I booted up after install I got this
> message:  error: no such device: 9136171-33f3-41c7-8bfd9da07e8f0226.
> I am able to insert the DVD and boot to the trial program. The
> portable drive is connected by USB. When disconnected and rebooted,
> the same message appears. After the error message, the screen goes to
> another line and reads: grub rescue.
> 
>From the description, it seems that Ubuntu installed to the external
(USB) drive instead of the HDD. Was that intentional?

"Grub Rescue>" prompt means that the computer is saying "I cannot find
the disk you originally told me to look for. Please help me find it."
Since you say the external drive is disconnected when this message
appears, that would be correct.

Grub tells the system to look at the UUID (that long string) of each
disk/partition on the system, and to load the linux kernel and initrd
file from a specific one. It cannot find that specific one. This might
happen if the disk is not attached to the system, or has been
reformatted/repartitioned since the original install that also installed
grub. The manual prompt is so the user can check what disks are on the
system and point grub to another disk.

More specific grub help is at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Grub2 . That
explains all the grub and grub-rescue commands, and what grub is looking
for.