Take the tour ×  I probably did something really stupid. My
primary hard drive on my laptop was getting full so I decided to
install Ubuntu 12.10 on an external hard drive.  When I have the
hard drive plugged in, I am first presented with the Grub screen
where I have to option to boot in Ubuntu or Windows. Everything
works fine with the external drive plugged in but when I try to
boot without it, I get a grub rescue screen and can't do
anything.  I believe my problem is that the computer first looks
for the Grub menu and can't find it. It then freezes up and is
unusable.  Is there any way to get past this problem so I don't
have to carry my external drive around all the time?
share|improve this question add comment  1 Answer  The problem
is that GRUB depends on some configuration files that are stored
in the Ubuntu partition, and since your Ubuntu is in the
external drive, it works only when you have that one plugged in.
There are multiple solutions to this problem:  Personally, I
recommend solution number