Unable to boot Kali installed on external HDD

[mikev1]

Hi all,

This is my first post on this forum so I hope you can help me out. Aroiund 6 or 8 years ago I was able to make Ubuntu run from an external HDD so I decided a week ago to do the same with Kali. I own an old Dell XPS L502X with a Samsung SDD. i have Win 7 and Mint running there. I didn't want to mess again with partitions as the SSD is only 240GB so I decided to use one of my out-of-use HDD. I took the old HDD enclosure I used all those years ago and an old 60GB HDD and after struggling with the UBS Kali installer not detecting the cd-rom and later wanting to use both internal and external swap partitions, I was finally able to install it (I choose GRUB to install on the external HDD)

Rebooted, setup BIOS to start from USB but first I got the "_" sing blinking non-stop, restart and then it stated "Operation System not found" (if you were thinking I made a mistake on the "Operation" word, I did not, it says that instead of Operating). I run again live USB and tried to reinstall GRUB on the external HDD but got error:

grub-probe: error: failed to get canonical path of 'overlay'
grub-probe: error: failed to get canonical path of 'overlay'
Could not find device for /boot: Not found or not a block device

My external HDD was mounted so I kept trying to find something to correct the issue and one post stated to change inode size from 256 to 128 as found the GRUB does not work with 256 so umounted the partition, made the change and mount back, run the grub-install thing and it worked, unfortunately, when I rebooted, i was still getting the same error.

Any ideas?

[Gh0sT.sh]

You'll need to do a bit of remounting and remapping.


After booting the liveCD, we'll mount the Ubuntu partition to /mnt with:


sudo mount /dev/sd*# /mnt
where *# is updated to your Ubuntu partition.


If you have a separate /boot partition, we'll need to mount it in /mnt/boot as well:


sudo mount /dev/sd*# /mnt/boot
where*# is updated to your /boot partition.


This should mount it with enough access to get the canonical path if needed, but we'll likely not need this.


To finish up, just update grub with the correct root and target:


sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sd*#

Hope this would fix it