Dual Booting | Vista and Ubuntu

g4m3rof1337

g4m3rof1337

Active Member
I want to dual boot Vista and Ubuntu on my laptop, I would like to know how I would set this up. Would I just create partitions, then install them on that, then it would automatically ask me what OS I want to boot into at the Start up/Log In screen?

Also, my laptop came with two 160GB drives, and after awhile, only one was noticeable in the My Computer section, C:, but in the Device Manager it shows two. I'm going to use GParted tomorrow and see if something happened to the other drive, like a format issue or something.


And I assume I would need to format the drive if I want to dual boot, and if there isn't a partition on it? What about the second drive? If that has nothing/some files on it, can I just install Ubuntu on that drive, and leave the first drive alone?




Thanks.
 
You would have to install ubuntu after vista as vista would wreck the GRUB menu (menu that lets you switch which OS you want to choose from) and then you could only load vista unless you manually fixed it, which I don't know how.

What you do is delete your partitions when installing vista, then make a new one and make it how ever large you want it to be and install vista on that, then install ubuntu on the rest of the space.
 
All you need to do is shrink your Vista partition(s) and delete the ones you don't need (as Kewl said, you need to have Vista isntalled first); then you run Ubuntu install, allocate most of the free space for an ext3 partition and some for a swap partition if you need one (if you're planning on doing this on your sig lappy you probably won't need one, but you can create a, say, 1-2GB swap just to be sure). Ubuntu will atumatically set GRUB up so that you can choose the boot your Vista partition whenever you like.

As for partitioning, it seems to be a common practice to have two separate partitions, one mounted as '/' (root) and one as '/home' (similar to the documents and settings folder in Windows).
 
With vista already being unstable enough would it really be a good idea to make the entire partition itself less stable by resizing it though?
 
I found Ubuntu very easy to dual boot with - it does everything itself. The computer boots straight to the grub menu thing, where you select the o/s.

You don't have to prepare anything, just download the correct ubuntu stuff, burn it onto a cd, and boot from the cd drive - ubuntu will run straight off the cd, and once it's loaded there's an option to install it sitting on its desktop. It does all the partition stuff then.
Very quick, very simple.
 
Irishwhistle said:
Just set up two separate partitions and install Vista first, that way it'll work right away.
Click to expand...

Not entirely true. You will need to configure your boot loader, which it will do during the install process, like GRUB or LILO. Vista no longer uses the boot.ini file it uses an executable called bootcfg.exe or something like that. I haven't ever dual booted a Vista system ( I just run VMs these days) so I don't know the specifics. However, I have read that it is a bit more of a pain than dual booting with say XP which uses the boot.ini file.

Depending on how you install Linux too, you may want 3 partitions or 4, if you want separate partitions for the swap file and for the /Users directory (or /Homes in some Linux distros).

Like people said the OS installer is pretty straight forward, but that is not a guarantee it will for you. You may have to go manually edit the /boot/grub.conf file or something of the like once you get it installed.
 
tlarkin said:
Not entirely true. You will need to configure your boot loader, which it will do during the install process, like GRUB or LILO. Vista no longer uses the boot.ini file it uses an executable called bootcfg.exe or something like that. I haven't ever dual booted a Vista system ( I just run VMs these days) so I don't know the specifics. However, I have read that it is a bit more of a pain than dual booting with say XP which uses the boot.ini file.

Depending on how you install Linux too, you may want 3 partitions or 4, if you want separate partitions for the swap file and for the /Users directory (or /Homes in some Linux distros).

Like people said the OS installer is pretty straight forward, but that is not a guarantee it will for you. You may have to go manually edit the /boot/grub.conf file or something of the like once you get it installed.
Click to expand...

True, I've never dual booted with Vista (only XP and 2000)... so best thing to do is follow this guide: http://apcmag.com/how_to_dualboot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first.htm
 
Irishwhistle said:
True, I've never dual booted with Vista (only XP and 2000)... so best thing to do is follow this guide: http://apcmag.com/how_to_dualboot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first.htm
Click to expand...

Good guide, and to sum it up, once Grub is loaded you will need to reinstall the Vista boot loader and you can use this app to do it.

http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

The instructions are in the link that Irish provided. It all seems pretty straight forward so I don't think you should encounter any problems.
 
Just install from vista.. Ubuntu cd have windows installer called woobi..
Click to expand...
You mean wubi? I've heard it's pretty buggy, plus it's more for testing and evaluating purposes than actually running it as a "serious" OS.
 
hackapelite said:
You mean wubi? I've heard it's pretty buggy, plus it's more for testing and evaluating purposes than actually running it as a "serious" OS.
Click to expand...

That may be true. One of the main disadvantage is hardrive read/write speed. If you are not serious with ubuntu, that may be not a problem to you.

If you are serious with ubuntu, better install vista then ubuntu.
 
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