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

[Richard Owlett]

Alan Pope wrote:
> 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

I've just downloaded that and 
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download to which 
Colin referred. I've got some reading ahead.
[As one how has written manuals, I approve of reading the 
manual ;)


>
> 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

"www.microsoft.com could not be found." ;/
I'll try later.
Thanks

>
> Al.
>