grub on wrong HD

[Friedpet]

Hey.

My brother installed opensuse on his external, but now he can't get into windows without the external plugged in. I suppose grub is on the external?

Is there any way this can be moved or corrected so that he can load windows without the need of the external?

[ponder]

I suspect the MBR is on the internal drive and the files it points to lives in the root of the external.

If this is the case here is what I would do:

1- Reinstall GRUB pointing to MBR of the external drive. When he wants to boot into suse he would have to select the BIOS boot option for the external drive.

2- Boot off the Windows install media and restore the MBR on the internal drive to it's original MS setup.2-


What happened here is you have grub trying to start from the internal hdd MBR but grub needs files that lives on the linux partition and if the external is not plugged in you cannot access those files.

Another option would be to create a small 200MB /boot partition on the internal HDD and reinstall grub to the internal drive. This would put the files it needs on the internal drive during booting. I'm not 100% certain about this but hopefully someone else can comment on this option.

[SBSP]

yes it probably installed the boot loader on the external then updated the internal.

i think you can fix this to remove the external, then boot with a windows cd, and select the option to get into the recovery console
then run fixmbr then fix boot.

it should fix the problem, if you want to boot into linux again, then connect the external and select to boot from it when the pc boots