Can't boot without Flash Drive plugged in
It looks like Grub got installed to the USB drive. Boot with the USB drive, open a terminal window by pressing Ctrl-Alt-T then run
sudo grub-install /dev/sdX
Where sdX is the drive you wish to boot from. That command will install GRUB to the MBR of the desired hard drive (sda,sdb,sdc,sdd), which should make it bootable. The commands sudo fdisk -l
or lsblk
should help you identify which drive you want.
Boot-Repair
The problem
Grub, Ubuntu's bootloader, was installed on the flash drive, and not on your internal hard drive, as it should have been.
Solution
Boot with the flash drive plugged in. Remove it once Ubuntu is booted up.
Run the following commands from a Terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair
boot-repair
Click on the "Recommended repair" button, and reboot.
Explanation
Boot-Repair installed Grub to your internal hard drive. This allows your computer to boot without depending on the bootloader that was installed on the flash drive.
Glossary
Bootloader: a piece of code that runs before any operating system is running. A bootloader is used to boot other operating systems. Each operating system usually has its own bootloader.
GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader): a bootloader package developed to support multiple operating systems and allow the user to select among them during boot-up. It is Ubuntu's default bootloader.
Command, command line: the traditional Unix environment , where you type commands to tell the computer what to do.
Terminal: an application that allows you to access the command line. Open it by hitting its keyboard shortcut, Ctrl Alt T
You could also try to use repairing software e.g. boot-repair-ubuntu from ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install boot-repair