Trouble booting

[jacklancer]

i installed BT4 from iso on my local HDD with windows using unetbootin, booted and ran BT forensics, then clicked the install.sh on the desktop to migrate to external HDD, created new reiser file system and installed it there. seems to work fine... but only on my computer. seems when i plug it in to another computer, with all the right bios settings, it says "missing operating system". can anyone help me?

[Archangel-Amael]

i installed BT4 from iso on my local HDD with windows using unetbootin, booted and ran BT forensics, then clicked the install.sh on the desktop to migrate to external HDD, created new reiser file system and installed it there. seems to work fine... but only on my computer. seems when i plug it in to another computer, with all the right bios settings, it says "missing operating system". can anyone help me?

Oh dear. You did what ?
Looks to me like you hosed your box.

[Charles]

Indeed, looks like it's hosed. Probably going to have to reinstall Windows. You could boot off a gparted cd and see what the partitions look like to tell if it's been completely hosed or not.

[xX_Spiidey_Xx]

get out your windoze install disc. sounds like you're going to need it.

teh part that confuses me the most is:

i installed BT4 from iso on my local HDD with windows using unetbootin,

are you saying that you used windoze to install backtrack to usb, then ran your live boot on the same system and installed backtrack? that's what sense I can make of it. if that's the case, you have two options:
1) enjoy backtrack 4 as your new desktop;
2) reinstall windoze, then read http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forum...t-install.html if you still want a local copy of bt4

in your "unique" circumstance, i totally recommend against a hard drive install for you, given your apparent level of experience.

[crweedon]

if the windows partition was still bootable then it sounds to me like you did a full hdd install to your external usb hdd, in that case you need to reformat the external hdd because not every other computer you take the external hdd to has the grub bootloader setup the way your computer has. i agree with spidey, stick to the live disc and follow the tuts for persistent usb key install

[Charles]

Oh, my bad, thought the OP meant it gave that error on his machine.

The "missing operating system" message is probably due to the external drive not having grub loaded on it.

I totally agree with the last 2 posters, in that just make a persistent usb install of BT4 and do it that way.

[xX_Spiidey_Xx]

The "missing operating system" message is probably due to the external drive not having grub loaded on it.

yarp, i just re-read the op's message, and it's definitely confusing. you just made a little more sense of it for me; it seems to me that the op has this problem:

1] the op ran install.sh off the live boot (made in windoze using unetbootin)
2] the op then wiped his(?) _external_ drive, and formatted with reiserfs
3] on the last screen of the installer, the op failed to choose the right drive to install grub to, resulting in the "operating system not found" error, whenever the external drive was detached... because grub was looking for it to load it's config files from the /boot dir in order to boot bt4/windoze.

my proposed (revised) solution, is to get out your windoze recovery disk, and attempt to fix your mbr by visiting here, Microsoft Corporation (xp) or here How to use the Bootrec.exe tool in the Windows Recovery Environment to troubleshoot and repair startup issues in Windows (vista).

you will have to reinstall backtrack4 to your external disk, if the above works for you