I’ve just installed OpenSUSE for the first time to an external USB hard drive on this laptop. The laptop is my girlfriends so she wants Windows and as I can’t stand web developing on Windows I chose OpenSUSE.
I didn’t really think about this during installation but GRUB is installed on the external HDD. I really need a way to install or move it onto the internet HDD so Windows can be booted without the need of the external HDD. I really have no idea how to do that and I’m extremely new to OpenSUSE (20 minutes actually!).
There’s a bit of confusion in my mind here: If you attached the usb drive and booted up the Suse install disk and installed Suse in straightforward manner, Grub would replace the windows boot code in the Master Boot Record of the laptop’s first internal hard drive with Grub boot code. And you would get a Linux boot menu from there on. But it hasn’t done that so you must have done something different from what I just described. Whatever that was will determine how the problem you posed should be addressed. So what was it that you did to get the Grub code into the MBR of the usb drive?
Hello, I have this same problem, its a bit headscratching for me as also a complete newbie. I installed linux on an external usb drive, now, when I boot without drive this attached grub fails (with it attached it works fine, choosing between linux and XP at will). Its a bit of a pain, I now carry a 160Gb drive around… What I can remember doing is, in paranoia of overwriting/formatting my internal drive is making sure to select it as unused during the partitioning section of the install. Any help with how I can simply “move” grub to my internal drive would be amazing. Or can I piggy back grubs, i.e. put another grub on the internal drive - I wouldn’t mind having to make two choices to run linux.
I’ve messed about with a grub boot cd, but so far the syntax is baffling me! Help very appreciated.
If you can make a small partition on the intenal drive for all the files under /boot in your current setup. And move your /boot files to the partition, and mount the partition as /boot, you’d be fixed.
That’s complicated. Simpler is, as you said, make a small partition on internal drive, reinstall Linux and in the partitioning, put swap, root and home on the external, but mount the partition that you made on the internal drive as /boot.