How to install Ubuntu
and keep Windows
If you wants to install Ubuntu on a PC without
removing Windows 7
Ubuntu offers three ways
to launch the operating system without hurting Windows. Two of these options
require a bootable Ubuntu CD or flash drive, so I'll first discuss how to set
up those devices.
You need to download
either the 32- or 64-bit version of the Ubuntu desktop .iso
file. To turn the. iso file into a CD or DVD, simply double-click it. A program
should come up to walk you through the burning process. If it doesn’t,
install the free ISO Recorder and try again.
To create a bootable flash
drive, you’ll need the Universal USB Installer--another
free program. It’s pretty easy to use.
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Universal USB Installer
Option
1: Try before you install
When you boot from your Ubuntu media
(whether it’s CD, DVD, or flash drive), you get two options: Try Ubuntu and
Install Ubuntu.
Select Try Ubuntu. This loads the operating system
directly into RAM, without writing anything to your hard drive. You can try it
out, experiment with the bundled applications, and surf the web.
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Your first choice in booting from an Ubuntu
disc or flash drive
But remember that you’re
booting from a static source. Any changes you make to the Ubuntu environment
will last only until you reboot. It’s a limited version of the OS.
Option
2: Install Ubuntu inside Windows
This is the most
convenient way to install a configurable version of Ubuntu and keep Windows.
But it doesn’t work with Windows 8, or with computers that have UEFI
firmware.
Instead of the .iso file, this option
requires you to download and run the Ubuntu
Installer program within Windows.
After you fill in the requested information, it does the install, which
includes a reboot into Ubuntu.
When the installation is done, booting will
give you a boot menu with both operating systems. Windows will be the default.
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Install Ubuntu from inside Windows
And guess what? If you
decide you don’t like Ubuntu, you can go into Windows and uninstall it through
Control Panel, just like any other Windows program.
Install
Ubuntu next to Windows
This technique will work on systems where
the previous version wouldn’t. It creates a version of Unbuntu on its own
partition that is not easily removed.
You’ll need to boot from the disc or flash
drive I discussed above. Select the Install Ubuntu option. When asked later in the
wizard, select Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7(or
whatever Windows version you're using).
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Install Ubuntu in its own partition while keeping Windows
This creates a new Ubuntu
partition, installs Ubuntu there, and rewrites your PC’s boot sector. Now, when
you boot, you’ll get a particularly ugly menu that allows you to select your
operating system. This time, Ubuntu will be the default.
Clicking Continue from the previous step will land you
here. If, as in this example, you have Windows 7 installed on the target hard
drive, you should see the same three options shown here. Because you will be
creating partitions manually, the option you want to select is something
else.
That should bring you to the advanced disk partitioning tool. Again, if
we are operating from the same point, that is, if you have a default
installation of Windows 7 on the target hard drive, you should see two ntfs
partitions (/dev/sda1 and/dev/sda2) listed. To install Ubuntu, you
will have to resize that partition. Note: If have free unallocated space
on the hard drive, you do not have to go through this partition resizing
process. To
resize the partition, select it and click the Change button.
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Window is opened. The only thing to do here, tell the installer for
windows 7 space. The rest will be used for Ubuntu. The system used for this
tutorial has about 324 GB of disk space. I chose to keep 100 GB for Windows.
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Windows will look like this. Click OK.
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After the resizing of partition successfully, you should see the freed
space marked as free space. Select it
and click Add to start creating partitions for
Ubuntu 12.04.
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Though you need to create at
least three partitions for installing Ubuntu, I will create four just to show
how it should be done if you want to have the home directory on a separate
partition.
The first partition is boot you
want to create. The recommended size for it, is 500 MB. but if you expect to
use the system for a long time, spanning several updates, you need the extra
space. The mount point should be /boot. And you want to keep the default file
system – ext4. This is important because errors have been reported when using
ext2 for the boot partition OK.
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The second
partition will be the root partition. For this tutorial, I assigned 20 GB to
it. Anything that is at least more than 75% above the recommended minimum of
4.4 GB should be good. The mount point should be /. Keep the default file
system. OK
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The third
partition is for the home partition. Since this where any file you download or
generate is stored, it should be assigned the bulk of the available disk space.
Use /home as the mount point, and keep the default file system. OK.
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The fourth and last partition will be for Swap. This is disk space made
available for the system to use as virtual memory whenever the need arises.
Give it an appropriate size (4 GB or 4000 MB should be more than enough on any
system). Select swap area from the Use
as dropdown menu. OK.
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Back to the main Advanced disk partitioning tool window, you should see
the partitions you just created, besides the existing ntfs (Windows 7)
partitions. Because the first Ubuntu partition was created as a logical
partition (the installer does that by default), it is listed as sda5.
This is the boot partition and it is where the boot files for Ubuntu will be
installed, not in the MBR, which is the default. Note that installing GRUB in
the MBR is the same as installing it in sda. This is what you
see in the Device for boot loader installation dropdown menu. So what you want to do
here, is select sda5 (our boot partition) from that menu.
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