Error 21 GRUB on Aces Aspire One Netbook 10.1"

[aldoibarraperez]

Hello Guys:

I am new to Linux Ubuntu and I have bought recently an acer aspire one netbook 10.1 inch screen, 160 GB HD, 1Gb in RAM, windows XP service pack 3. I installed ubuntu netbook remix 9.04 -having interest in looking how it works seeking to learn to use it- mounting the image on a USB memory working as live CD and then having installed ubuntu on an external IDE USB enabled hard drive using the case adaptor, in a beggining it worked well I could access either ubuntu or windows xp in the selection menu, but after a few tries it showed me error 21 GRUB, what happens is that I can not access windows xp directly, I am conditioned to have the USB external hard drive connected in order to show me the selection menu to have access to win xp or ubuntu otherwise it will show me the GRUB error 21 what can I do in order to have this problem corrected, I have requested my recovery CD's to acer looking to have the factory type restoration, does anybody knows if this will work or shoul I do something different following your counceling? Is there any solution to this matter? I really appreciate your interest to this matter. Please help me I do not want to be conditioned to be carrying the external hard drive everytime I need to use the Netbook.

Thank You

Best Regards.

[L4Linux]

Download SuperGrubCD and make a Live-USB from it.
You can use Unetbootin for this, it runs on both Linux and windows.

SuperGrubCD will make you a bootloader on the internal hdd, so you don't need to use the external hdd to boot. But when you want to boot Ubuntu, you 'll have to boot from the external hdd instead of the internal, because it won't have Ubuntu listed. (There should be a way, but I haven't tried installing anything in external disks...)

Since you have 160GB, I recommend installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. Just defrag windows(it is an essential step),
resize the windows partition during the installation process and make 2 partitions for Linux:
1GB swap
As much as you want(minimum 4GB, better give 8 or more if you have available space), type ext3, mount point /
It will install the bootloader on the internal hdd.

After the install, you can install a ton of codecs, java,ms fonts, dvd playback and more with the command:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras