Beating Fiesty Fawn into submission

I successfully installed Ubuntu on my laptop today, after a little bit of poking.

My Setup

• Dell XPS M1210 (snazzy laptop I bought on ebay)
• External USB - 160GIG FREECOM (really quiet - I think it's sleeping)

Install Steps

1. Download Fiesty Fawn ISO - nice download page
2. Burn Fiesty Fawn - The Dell has this cheesy DVD/CD burner pre-installed
3. Reboot with CD and External USB Hard drive attached
4. Choose Install
5. Follow the friendly prompts and use the entire external hard disk
6. Click the advanced option and install grub to '(hd1)' otherwise it would overwrite the Vista boot loader.
7. Install and reboot
8. Change the Bios settings 'F2' to boot USB before the onboard hard drive.
   

This is where I hope everything installs and works and I feel all warm and fuzzy about Ubuntu. Sadly it didn't Dell just merrily booted Vista, hmmmmm.

So I changed the bios again taking the internal hard drive off the boot option. On reboot Dell failed to find a boot disk, which I thought was so uncool so I told it to retry. On the retry grub came up!

Sadly when I clicked on the boot options Grub failed to find any partitions, but Grub being highly user intuitive (especially if your a Unix vi user) allowed me to edit the config. Ubuntu installed the boot loader to my external drive however it didn't correctly set the boot loader to boot from hd0. Which I guessed it now was instead of hd1.... a little confusing but it all works, apart from silly old Dell needing to retry on boot to find the external hard disk.