USB Disk drive won't boot. No such partition error?

Hello everyone! I have an HP laptop that broke recently and am trying to boot the laptop's disk drive with another one of my working PCs.

The laptop disk drive is still good so I took the disk drive from the laptop and put it into a USB adapter so I could plug it into my Acer Aspire PC (which runs Windows xp) and boot the laptop disk from there, which I have done before with other disk drives with no problem.

BUT, when I select the laptop's disk drive to boot on my Acer's boot menu, (it gives me a list, I can boot from the Acer's internal disk or the USB disk which I want to) instead of going to grub so I can select which OS I want, I get a black screen that says "error: no such partition." Then it gives me a "grub rescue>" prompt.

I have Ubuntu Linux and Windows 7 on that laptop disk. It won't show me the grub screen, and I am at a loss as to how to get back grub so I can select which OS to boot. I've booted other disks this way without issue but I'm unable to with this one. I've tried a few things I've seen on the web but nothing is quite like my situation, and I haven't found anything useful. I'm also fairly knowledgeable about computers but I'm no seasoned computer user.

I have important data on my laptop's disk I would like to get back. If anyone knows how to fix this, I would be very grateful.

Thank you!

Welcome to the forum. When you say boot the drive are you trying to boot or just open the drive? What type of drive is it is ssd as it may need drivers and you can't normally boot from external drive with some windows

samuria said:

Welcome to the forum. When you say boot the drive are you trying to boot or just open the drive? What type of drive is it is ssd as it may need drivers and you can't normally boot from external drive with some windows

Thank you for the welcome!

I am attempting to boot the disk drive (which I pulled out of my laptop). It has Linux and Windows 7 on it and I put it into a USB adaptor so I could plug it into my Acer Aspire and get to my Linux and Windows 7 OSs.

The laptop disk drive is a Hitachi brand one, same as the one in my Acer. I apologize, I'm not sure what SSD is, but there's no mention of it on any of the labeling.

It spins up and hums nicely, no clicks or abnormal noises, and my Acer recognizes it in the boot menu, but when I select it from the boot menu it goes to the "error: no such partition" thing, and gives me the grub rescue prompt.

Back on my laptop when I booted this disk drive (back when it was working normally) it would start up and give me a grub menu and I could select which OS, Linux, and it had Windows7 (sda1) and a memory test selection and such.

I have no idea what to punch into the grub rescue command prompt to fix it. I think grub might be screwed up somehow.

Nativly win7 wont run from an external drive thats your problem