HELP! - installing Ubuntu to USB stick "trashes" hard drive

[Alan Pope]

On 14 October 2011 16:59, Richard Owlett <rowlett at pcnetinc.com> wrote:
> I found I'd been sucker punched on the next reboot :<
> The BIOS driven screen comes up.
> I let it time out, vainly innocently expecting Windows to come up.
>   I get a simple menu the first several items are Ubuntu specific.
>   The last option is Windows which I had explicitly "chosen" by *NOT*
>      choosing an alternate boot device.
>   *EVEN WORSE* if the USB stick is not there, I get an error message
>      and a "grub rescue" CLI prompt.
>

Sounds like you did what I did once. During the install you get to a)
choose the disk on which to install Ubuntu, and b) choose the
partition on which you want to install the bootloader (grub). I
suspect you did a) correctly, selecting the USB stick, but b)
defaulted to installing the bootloader on the first internal disk.

So there are two issues you now have:-

1) grub is not installed on the USB disk.
2) grub is installed on the internal disk.

1) can be fixed by booting into Ubuntu and using "grub-install"
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling_GRUB2

2) can be fixed by use of 'fixmbr' I think
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx?mfr=true

Al.