Installing Ubuntu in an external HD

[Thomas Kaiser]

José Manuel Martínez Martínez wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> Thank very much for your kind attention!
> I'd like to say everything is fixed but... I'm sorry, it isn't.
> Your assumption is absolutely right. That's what I want.
> I started with the steps you described. But I have a new problem.
> I runned fixmbr, but as result I've got an invalid partition table. The right command is fixboot. 
> But it was to late. When I start my computer I can't boot windows because I get the following
> message:
> "Pre-boot eXecution Environment (PXE) v2.1
> (C) Copyright 1997-2000 Intel Corporation
> PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
> PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM
> Invalid Partition table"

Hello Jose

I don't know what happened to your MBR :-(
"fixmbr" should fix this, at least the boot code. But there are some 
information about the partition table in the MBR. So, it looks like this 
is broken for some strange reason.

"fixmbr" should fix the MBR and "fixboot" should fix the partition boot 
sector.

"fixmbr" and "fixboot" worked always for me in the past.

Check http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/ntboot/ on how to build a boot floppy. 
Maybe this helps.

If you know the partition layout you have, you could re-partition the 
disk with exactly the same partition layout you had. This can be done 
with "fdisk". "fdisk" will only touch the partition table, so it should 
be save to not destroy your data. But I think it is a high risk to do 
this. On the other hand, if you write the same partition table like you 
had before, every thing should be ok again (in theory).

Sorry, it is hard for me to figure out the right strategy for your 
problem, right now :-(

You could browse the nu2.nu site, here are a lot of information about 
booting and helpful tools.

I hope you get this issue fixed.

Regards, Thomas


-- 
http://www.kaiser-linux.li