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Since the C drive on my dell dimension 4600 has little space left on it, I decided to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on a USB, load Ubuntu to my Iomega 250 GB external hard drive. I used 2gb for mount point / in ex4, 4gb for swap space and the rest for /home in ex4 also. I have set the bootloader to the hard drive, and the installation finished fine.

After restarting then booting from it, and reinstalling Ubuntu on it multiple times, the same error message appears. However I can get to the pink screen and when I choose the first option I get a pink screen which stays for 30mins, or this error message. Then after turning the computer off and on again, I go to the second option on the first pink screen which show a lot of white upon black text. Then the error message shows.

Irritatingly, I can't type "help" to get the commands as my computer keyboard is disabled at this point.

enter image description here
As I'm new I'm sorry for any missed details.

Here are some specs of my (desktop) computer:

  • 120GB internal hard drive
  • 4 GB RAM
  • Intel Pentium 4 (3 GHz)
  • 128MB GeForce FX 5200 (NVidia)
  • Windows XP SP3

The USB had Ubuntu 12.04 loaded onto it from Universal USB installer.

Could someone please tell me how to get Ubuntu working and why this happens. Thank you.

Oscar Brennan
  • 21

2 Answers2

1

You are doing a USB to USB install, so check out bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub-installer/+bug/384633
The initial grub.cfg generated by install is wrong after the install media is removed, as all the disks get renamed one letter higher, and your new target system is left as a non-existent sdc instead of sdb. At the grub menu screen, look at the instructions at the bottom, and type e to edit, then fix the device on the search line for root= and on the linux ... line. At the first successful boot, run 

  sudo update-grub

to fix the config file.
Feel free to add yourself to the "does this affect you" list on the bug, and maybe it will be fixed someday.

edwin
  • 3,829
ubfan1
  • 19,049
0

So first things first, booting off of an external USB hard drive will be extremely slow. I've done it before, and its really hard to deal with. Read and write times will be significantly slower, especially since you probably are not using USB 3.0

What First suggestion: give THIS page a read. Set 90 as the time out in the kernel parameter. Try that and let us know what happens.

Also, you can try using the program "EasyBCD" in Windows to edit your master boot record to try to fix the boot sequence. I'd give the timeout change a try first, and if that doesnt work we can look at the EasyBCD.

sbolel
  • 380