External hard disk installation and error 21

After going through the YaST2 installation process on the live CD (I installed opensuse 11.1 on a 1TB external hard drive), the installer prompts me to reboot the computer without the live CD to continue the installation process, as expected. But when I did reboot the computer booting from my external hard drive, I am faced with a GRUB interface asking for input (it also tells me that by pressing TAB, I can see a list of all available commands). Nothing about continuing the installation, and no GUI at all.

After a few attempts at finishing the installation, I decided to leave it for later and ask a few friends for help, so I tried to boot into my internal hard drive, which I have not touched during the installation process (did not select for anything during the installation and format process). However, instead of booting windows, it boots into yet another GRUB interface saying “loading grub 2.5…” then “unable to load grub: error 21”

“loading grub 2.5…”
should that read 1.5 not 2.5 ?

It would appear grub was installed on the internal hdd. Do you have a MS cd and what version of Windows ?

If it is XP and you have MS cd , boot into Recovery Console and run ‘fixmbr’.
If it is Vista, I do not know.

If you do not have a MS cd, does the comp have a floppy drive ?

I have 7. But I just reinstalled 7 since I wanted to reformat the drive anyway, but I just want to know how I can avoid this so that my windows internal hard drive won’t be affected when I install suse on an external drive. It’s kind of frustrating when you think about it because why would it install grub on my internal hard drive when I did not select the internal hard drive for any kind of change. Thanks for the help.

Also, does anyone know how I can continue the installation on my external hard drive?

I think if you choose grub to be in the mbr it will install in the internal hard drive where windos 7 resides. Sorry can’t help you with the external drive installation, haven’t tried it.