Dual-Boot Ubuntu 10.10 / Windows 7 on Dell Latitude with second hard drive in modular bay

Question

I want to setup my Dell Latitude laptop with an Ubuntu 10.10 in addition to the already existing Windows 7 installation. Windows is installed on the internal hard drive, which has a Bitlocker encryption. Ubuntu is supposed to run off a second hard drive, which I inserted in the laptop's modular bay through an adapter. Therefore, it is occasionally swapped with an optical drive and is not present every time. The setup is:

/dev/sda1 
/dev/sda2 ntfs Windows 7 (encrypted)

/dev/sdb1 swap
/dev/sdb2 ext4 for Ubuntu
/dev/sdb3 (additional data partition) 

My first attempt was to install Ubuntu regularly to the second hard drive. This overwrote the Windows 7 MBR. The catch is: Bitlocker now refuses to boot (maybe because the MBR was changed?), and if I remove the second hard drive, grub enters rescue mode.

I tried restoring grub with

sudo grub-install --root-directory=/mountpath/of/sdb1 /dev/sdb

and also reinstalling Ubuntu and putting the grub in /dev/sdb, but advising the BIOS to boot from the modular bay hard drive, it won't find GRUB.

I further tried to add a GRUB2 boot entry via EasyBCD, but it won't find it, either (Says "No ang0")

Any ideas how to implement such a setup?

Answer 1

This post has suggestion for Bitlocker recovery. Maybe it can be useful for you.