0

I have a Dell inspiron n5050 with a damaged internal hard drive and I'm trying to load ubuntu 20.04 from an external 4T HDD as my main drive.

I've created a live usb from my other machine, boot from it on my damaged machine and installed ubuntu 20.04 on the external drive, then restarted , but all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor (_).

What I've tried:

  • boot from the usb, install & run boot-repair, but it's not working
  • on the black screen, hold shift or ctrl+alt+fx, but it does nothing
  • followed this article, until choose ‘Use as EFI system partition’, I don't find this option, I'm not sure but I think I don't have a EFI system (I'm still noob on this)

I don't understand why it does not boot from the hard drive, while the live usb boots just fine

Edit

I did follow the steps from here, but it did not work.

I tried to boot from the external drive on a VM on a macbook, and it did work, but on my Dell it's always a black screen.

Maybe it's something to do with usb 3 (HDD) vs usb 2 (DELL), as mentioned here

Enabling the xHCI option in the BIOS fixes the hanging boot issue

but I don't find this option

Mohamed Ramrami
  • 101
  • 2

1 Answers1

0

Installing to External Drive

If you are installing Ubuntu on External Drive it is nice to create a disk that will boot on either BIOS or UEFI machines,

The method on this Link: Easy Full Install USB that Boots both BIOS and UEFI is very simple to install, Just download the image file and use your other computer to flash it to the external disk using Rufus or Etcher in Windows or dd, Disks or mkusb in Ubuntu.

A more complex method, starting from scratch, can be found here: How to Create a Full Install of Ubuntu 20.04 to USB Device Step by Step

C.S.Cameron
  • 20,530
  • 12
  • 78
  • 125