I installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my external USB drive, where I have a 700GB NTFS partition followed by the new 6GB ext4 partition and a swap partition (all primary). The GRUB MBR is also installed to the external hard
disk.
Since my BIOS puts the external drive as first
disk when booting, I removed my internal hard
disk before installation in order to avoid ordering problems.
Now when I
boot from the external drive, GRUB is stuck at the rescue console with the error "unknown filesystem".
grub rescue> ls
(hd0) (hd0,msdos3) (hd0,msdos2) (hd0,msdos1)
ls (hd0,<any of them>)/ gives me "unknown filesystem", thus also "insmod normal"
GRUB doesn't seem to be able to read my Linux partition as you can see above?! How can I solve this?
Additional info:
bootinfoscript says (this is with the internal drive in again, but that does not make a difference):
Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb and looks at sector 1 of
the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks
for (,msdos2)/boot/grub on this drive.
sdb1: __________________________________________________________________________
File system: ntfs
Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS
Boot sector info: No errors found in the
Boot Parameter Block.
Operating System:
Boot files:
sdb2: __________________________________________________________________________
File system: ext4
Boot sector type: -
Boot sector info:
Operating System: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Boot files: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab /boot/grub/core.img
sdb3: __________________________________________________________________________
File system: swap
Boot sector type: -
Boot sector info:
