I've installed Ubuntu 18.04 successfully onto an external Samsung T5 SSD and it works well with my laptop (ASUS UX303UB: ).
However, when I try to boot from the T5 using my desktop, I get this weird black screen where a white space line type of thing that blinks and moves around a little, but mainly blinks in the upper-left quadrant of the screen. Sorry not allowed image embedding yet, but that's a link to a picture I found that looks similar. After a while it just goes into BIOS and I can switch the boot order back to Windows first and everything works fine.
My desktop is a Ryzen machine I built (I know I know, this could already be the reason it doesn't work, but I want to see if it could be something other than Intel vs AMD and different chipsets).
What I tried:
- Disabled fast boot
- Secure boot couldn't be disabled for some weird reason, but it was set to other OS, so it shouldn't be an issue as it's not set for Windows secure boot.
- Went back to the laptop today and the T5 boots nicely.
What I have noticed:
- I'm suspecting this is due to a GRUB issue (or more like my mistake somewhere along the installation), as when I boot into the internal SSD Windows 10 on my laptop, without the T5 connected, GRUB command line shows up and when I type exit it goes away and boots into Windows.
- The GRUB command line shows up on my laptop when the T5 is connected, I type exit and then appears the GRUB menu where I choose Ubuntu from and it boots nicely. The image is not from my PC, so it doesn't have Windows 7 there, I think it just says Windows Boot Manager.
Disk Manager is the other reason I'm suspecting a GRUB related mistake of mine. Here are screenshots from the Windows Disk Manager, first up is my C: drive on my Windows which has an EFI partition. Here's my T5which has those weird unallocated spaces and no boot/EFI partition. The SSD storage partition (NTFS in the picture) that I created works perfectly on my desktop as well, and it seesUbuntu's partition and swap (I guess that 16GB my swap space?) in disk manager.
But it doesn't boot.
So, did I accidentally install GRUB on my laptop, and if I did, how can I get it to the SSD? Or is it something else entirely.
31 Answer
Thank you oldfred for pointing me in the right direction! Your answer didn't work straight out of the box, but I managed to use Gparted to fiddle around with partitions, creating two 1GB partitions in the beginning of the drive, one exfat32 and one ext4 (EFI and boot drive respectively) and then boot-repair's advanced editor like you suggested and created a boot partition + an EFI partition so now my desktop happily boots into Linux (before it showed Samsung T5 in the boot priority list, now it shows Samsung T5 AND Ubuntu!). Writing this from Ubuntu as a happy man.
And the Windows stuff was due to an old drive I forgot to disconnect, boot-info didn't even recognize my RAID SSDs where my Windows 10 resides.
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