Help installing windows xp on 1st hd, and kubuntu/distros to external usb hd?

[fireboy]

Long story short: I hate windows! But, family needs itunes for ipods in windows greater than my computing needs!

I have tried for well over a week now to install wins xp to first hd and kubuntu to usb ext. hd.(Segate 1T).
Sometimes wins xp installs okay and boots up okay. Then I install kubuntu to ext. hd and put grub on first hd mbr and nothing works.
I get the "grub rescue" error.

Next time I put grub to ext. hd and kubuntu boots okay but no wins. I do same thing all over again and then, I get "nothing"!

I have done and tried all the above so many times I could not even guess how many times if my life depended on it!
I know I must have 40 hours of screen reading simular problems by others to no benifit.

What I need to know is this:
Pressing F8 when booting up on my desktop PC I get a "boot menu", asking for whitch drive to boot from.
I would like to know if this will work, by installing wins xp to the first hd without using grub so it boots right into to wins. Then install kubuntu on the external hd. using grub installed to ext. hd., then, using F8 key to get the boot menu to start kubuntu or other distros using grub?

In other words, this is the sequence of events:
When I want to use wins, just do regular boot into wins.
When I want to use kubuntu, boot holding down F8 key, when boot menu opens select ext. hd for grub to boot kubuntu and other distros?

Thanks in advance for taking the time!fb

[claydoh]

Yes

[oshunluvr]

AFAIK, it's not going to work. Your USB drive isn't mounted by GRUB, therefore GRUB cannot read it's files to load the 2nd stage or menu, thus you end up in GRUB recovery.

You can do this several other ways:

Install Kubuntu and GRUB to the USB drive and boot to it directly via F8.
Use another windows based boot manager (not grub) that will allow you to select the USB drive.
Manually copy the grub files to the hard drive and manually edit grub to boot from there (this will make kernel updates very difficult).
Shrink the windows partition a minimum of 8GB and just install Kubuntu there and dual boot.

Frankly, unless your hard drive is less than 40GB, I can't imagine why you would want to boot off the USB drive anyway. A fully loaded Kubuntu install will only use around 16GB or so not including your home data files. 20GB would be plenty for your whole system. Why not dual boot and keep large data (your videos and such) on the USB drive? It would be a lot more stable and faster.

[SteveRiley]

Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft and will not receive security updates. Connecting Windows XP to the Internet is a dangerous thing to do, and will only get worse over time. I'd encourage you to replace that with Windows 7 at least.