Grrrrrr Arrrgh!

[matukat]

Ok, I AM a linux noob, and I don't have great hardware....BUT after trying everything to get this to work, I am stumped.
I have a "MPC" also known as a "Micron" Transport GX2 Laptop with no hard drive and a locked cmos. I bought it from a guy on Craigslist a couple years back and it sat around waiting for me to do something with it. I now have a usb enclosure with a hard drive in it.
The laptop will BOOT and run Puppy linux off of a usb thumb drive. I tried to download and install several different versions of ubuntu to the usb enclosure. Nothing worked, so we sent for the "professional" disk from the Isle of Man.
2 weeks or so later I have the disk. Lo and Behold! It does the full install from the cd rom of the laptop to the usb enclosure with the hard drive! Then, looking forward to having an Ubuntu install I could use and learn, I went through the restart and got this:
Operating System Not Found. OVER AND OVER.
I put the disk in today to see if it would let me boot to the usb enclosure. Nope.
I put the thumb drive with Puppy on it on and started in puppy. It found and mounted the usb enclosure and shows the files ( or appears to ) for Ubuntu. Problem is.... I'm too linux dumb to get any further......ARRRRGH!
Thanks for any help in advance!
Randy
Oh, extra info- Puppy doesn't seem to let me use the rest of the thumb drive and will NOT save a file for the next session. It gets a "fatal exception" error or kernel panic error or some such. The Micron Transport has the "biometric fingerprint reader" also....... I think I bought a nice doorstop..........

[linuxd]

In future
Please make a descriptive Title.
Then it will be easy for associate experts to find your page

[matukat]

I'll see if I can edit a better title in. My frustration has the best of me right now.

[Rubberman]

Well, if it boots off the thumb drive, it should boot off the USB drive. If it had a hard drive, my guess would be that it actually put the boot loader on the hard drive. However, since it doesn't... If you boot Ubuntu from the CD-ROM, we should be able to tell what's going on with the USB drive. So, boot to the desktop (live operation) and we can go from there.

And I, for one, can appreciate your original title. In cases like this, Grrrr, Arrrghhh or something of the sort is very descriptive.

[D-cat]

My guess is the BIOS will not load GRUB off the USB drive, you'll have to configure and install syslinux to it (it should be available on the live boot). Although I have successfully made a bootable pen drive before, I don't exactly have a full memory of how it all worked. I imagine you can get some help from
Boot and run Linux from a USB flash memory stick | USB Pen Drive Linux
and the man files from syslinux.

Generally, the computer doesn't know the difference between a USB hard drive and a USB pen drive; structurally to the computer, they look the same, so for the most part the same proceedures should work for both.