error: no such partition grub rescue

Hi all. I am new to this forum as well as a fairly new ubuntu user. Yesterday I attempted to install ubuntu ver. 11.10 on my external hard drive. I have a WD Elements 1000gb external drive. I used the live cd and during install chose "something else". I allotted a partition of 80gb for the task. I partitioned it as follows: swap- 8gb, /boot ext2- 258mb, / ext4- 30gb, and /home ext4- approx. 42gb. My external hard disk is labelled as dev/sdb and the internal drive is dev/sda. I made sure that the grub bootloader was installed to dev/sdb. The whole reason for my choice to do this is to have ubuntu totally separate and portable. Anyhow, the installation went perfectly, no errors. Upon restart, I only get this error message. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Welcome to Major Geeks, Snowman2765

Is this a fresh install to /sdb or did you have other data on the drive? What do you see when you boot live and type this in terminal?

Code:

 fdisk -l

this should give you a list of partions (/dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 /SBA1... etc)

With a fresh install, I would attempt reinstall allowing install to overwrite sdb again.

If not a fresh install, you will have to do some minor prodding to tell grub where to boot.

Repair Grub help page

Purge and reinstall Grub2 thread from The Orange Side (Ubuntu Forums)

 

there was existing data on the drive but I am in the process of moving it off right now. after that I will format the drive and do a fresh install on the empty drive. I am hoping this will work. do i use fat32 and do you think that will resolve my issue? thanks

 

Linux will see the FAT32 as a win partition and will allow data back and forth (like music, documents and photos). Ubuntu will use a different format for the Linux install called EXT4. Ubuntu is also fairly hot swapable. I have a 12.5 GB IDE drive here that I install for test distros and simply unplug after power down. It finds my hardware again and from terminal I have upgraded a few times including both kernel and Ubuntu version. I have never installed on an external drive, but it can be done and is well documented.