I spent some time setting up a USB-connected hard drive for BT5 last week. Very shortly after I finished, I found out about Kali. I wasn't really into using BT5 all that much, so I figured I would install Kali over BT5. No muss, really.
I had the external hdd partitioned the way I wanted it from when I installed BT5... a large primary / partition, a swap, a FAT32 partition, and an NTFS partition. My plan was to format the / partition and install Kali Linux into it. Since I wasn't using the entire disk, I went with the manual installation options and installed into that large root partition.
Now, here's where I went wrong.
I was using my primary work laptop to install Kali onto the external USB. I booted into the Graphical Install setting of the LiveCD and began the installation. I did _not_ remove my primary HDD from the laptop but since I knew the primary HDD was sda and my external USB was sdb, I shouldn't have any trouble. Right?
After the installation was complete, I get a message about the need to install GRUB. OF course, I need GRUB. But the message as presented was ... strange. It referenced a "Windows Vista" partition on the disk. I may have missed it, but the message didn't strictly reference /dev/sdb. This HDD is a recycle. It could have had a Windows Vista partition on it at some point. I don't really know. Either way, I took a gamble and installed GRUB.
Here's what I was left with:
1. An external HDD that booted into GRUB Rescue.
2. A primary laptop HDD that booted into GRUB Rescue.
Whoops.
Everything is fixed. I repaired the MBR on the primary HDD with bootrec.exe for Windows 7. I repaired GRUB on the external HDD using a tutorial I found for repairing the same issue on an Ubuntu installation.
The moral is, I suppose, make sure that you're only dealing with a DVD and the disk you intend to install onto. There could be an issue here in the installer, but I wouldn't take my word for it. I was at work, distracted, etc.
