How to: Ubuntu-eee 900 MBR on the external SD Card
or how to change the grub menu to use the good disk.
When you install ubuntu-eee on a SD card, the default option is to put the MBR on the default hd0 which is the Windows disk… but what if you still want to use windows by default and ubuntu when you really want to?
- You use a live usb stick of ubuntu… but it’s a live less customizable version
- You install ubuntu on another SD card that you put in the free SD slot on the right (that’s what I did)
What you need:
- a SD of more than 4Gb (because you want to be able to upgrade your ubuntu to 8.10 soon or later) I recommend 16 Gb (~32 € on ldlc)
- a usb stick (~1 Gb) with the ubuntu live 8.04.1
- 50 minutes
- eee 900
Half of the job is done during the installation process, the other half at the first boot.
During the installation process:
when it comes to partitioning: choose guided or manual but choose the sdc disk (which should be the SD card but check twice!!!), click on advanced (bottom right button) and in the new popup set your MBR on the sdc too!
So now the install will be done on the sdc + your MBR will be on the sdc too.
At the end of the installation process, when your computer reboot, press ESC at the boot screen.
There you get a menu and instead of using the default disk (windows), you can choose your SD card (probably the last item on the list).
Grub will start and … ubuntu will not work, telling you there is some problem with the disk… it’s simply because during the installation process, your SD card was detected as hd2, and the installation stored that in the grub menu. But when you boot with your MBR on the slot in SD card it becomes hd0.
So all you need to do is to modify the root (hd2,0) into root (hd0,0).
Simply press ‘e’ in the menu to edit the first entry, then ‘e’ again to change the line 2 into a 0 and ‘enter’ to validate. Finally press ‘b’ to boot.
It’s almost done.
You still have to fix that once and for all and not at each boot.
Once ubuntu is up and running, edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst and replace any hd2 into hd0
well it’s done.
Remarks are welcome.
