Dual Boot Windows 7 And Linux Ubuntu - Fine Or Terrible Idea?
Oct 22, 2012
I would like to install Linux Ubuntu on my laptop alongside Windows using dual boot. However, people keep telling me that it is not a good idea this to be done on a laptop because of driver comparability and stuff like that. So is it OK if dual boot Ubuntu and Windows on a laptop or it is a terrible idea?
dual booting windows 7 home premium x64 with linux fedora 14 on dual independantly dedicated drives. i am a college student with moderate computer (windows) knowledge but am doing software development and would like to play around with some linux for a class. i have no prior experience with linux and have minimal knowledge of operation. i am currently running windows 7 and would like to keep it as my primary os. i do not wish to share media files across drives or os's, windows does that just fine as is and i dont want to get into a third drive. my current drive is a 1tb wd black caviar hdd. it is also currently 2/3rds full and the desktop is about 6 months old so i would rather not partition the drive for a dual boot. i would think that there are some other advantages for the os's operating independantly off their own drives other than if one hdd dies i should still have the other with its os still ok. i have read some topics about RAID configs with dual boot setups with dual drives like this but am not very familiar with RAID. is there a RAID config that would be beneficial in this situation? i currently do not have a RAID card. my tower internals are not very accessible and i dont like the idea of disconnecting drives depending on which os i want to operate.
I would like to learn some linux and for that i need a secondary OS, I want to keep my Internal as my Windows 7 drive and that has boot priority but i want the linux to run from partition 2 (or 1) on an external HDD
I want to install linux along with windows 7 on my Dell studio 15. For this as i have read on the threads that C: drive needs to be shrunk as it is the active partition . And for linux at least 10 GB should be kept as unallocated space . But when i tried to shrink my C: drive then the available space for shrinking is shown to be just 39 MB which is highly insufficient. how to increase this size and install linux on my PC .
I have been using Linux Mint, which is based on Ubuntu, since the last time I visited the forums but now I want to dual boot with Windows 7. So, I have just Mint 8 (based on Ubuntu 9.10) installed on my laptop (nothing else), and I if I wanted to dual boot with Windows 7, how would I do it? I know I could use VirtualBox to run Windows 7 but I want to dual-boot.
I'm using multiple hard drives to install both fedora and Windows 7. I've followed this online tutorial exactly: Dual-booting Fedora 14 and Windows 7 on a computer with 2 hard drives
The problem I seem to be facing is on the "Add a new Entry Step". His secondary OS partition has a drive letter assigned to it and I do not. I've gone into computer management and have tried to assign a drive letter to either of my secondary OS's hard drive partitions and it will not let me.
All I need is the boot loader to link to my second hard drive when the second option (OS) is chosen.
How can i dual boot windows 7 and Linux. Can i just create a disk partition and install Linux on that and have windows on another partition and will i be able to choose which one i want on boot? or do i have to do something else i have windows installed now.
Ok so what i have is Windows 7 RC installed to my hard drive. I have a seperate partition which i would like to install Ubuntu on. Granted i could just go ahead and straight install but then i would be using the Grub bootloader and i don't want to.
I have a Windows 7 OS installed on a SATA drive, A few days ago I installed Ubuntu 10.10 on an IDE drive. So far the only way is to switch the HDD drives in BIOS to boot up the one I want.
I currently run Ubuntu as the sole OS on my Laptop. Using a G-Parted live CD I partitioned half of my disk space, the one half dedicated to running Ubuntu and the other half to Windows 7. I downloaded a torrent of Windows 7, one that I have used before with success (so one that I trust) and burned it to a DVD-RW at the slowest burning speed possible. I booted Windows 7 through the DVD and began to do a clean install of Windows 7 on this one Partition that I left completely empty for the new OS. Everything runs smoothly and I go through the set-up until suddenly the installation hangs at 0% when 'Expanding Windows Files'.
I can't get Win 7 to boot after setting up dual boot (Ubuntu 10.10) on my GF's laptop. I'll describe the problem and everything that has been tried so far. REALLY hoping somebody has an idea, I'm getting desperate.I installed Ubuntu last night via the Live CD. Used the Live version to install alongside Windows and partition the drive, install Grub, etc. At reboot, after POST it would just go to a black screen with a flashing cursor. I could only run off the live CD. A forum member determined the Grub was trying to load from the wrong partition. We changed that and voila! Grub now loads properly. I can boot into Ubunto via Grub with zero problems. HOWEVER: when I try to boot into Win 7 from Grub, it just locks at the same flashing cursor of death screen. The 7 partition is till intact, I can see and access all the files on the 7 partition from within Ubuntu, however 7 will not boot. I have tried downloading and burning the Win 7 repair disk and doing all of the following,Running the automatic Start Up Repair - several times. All it does is remove Grub, but booting still goes to the flashing cursor and I have to reinstall Grub again to be able to do anything after POST.I have used the command prompt to run "bootsect /nt60 SYS /mbr". Has the same effect as above.I have used all the bootsec.exe /fixmbr, /fixboot, and /rebuildBCD commands. Again, all have the same effect and I have to reinstall Grub to get anywhere.I don't have an installation disk to try and just do a repair install because Asus apparently doesn't feel that I would need one of these. All I have is the recovery disks from the Asus AIRecovery application that want to just re-format the entire drive and start over. This isn't an option. It's my GF's laptop (mine gave up the ghost last week) and we both have WAY too much highly important data on here. Not to mention she would castrate me . Now from all my research the only other thing I've come across that sounds possible is that the boot flag needs to be set to a different partition. Somebody had a somewhat similar problem and it turned out the way Dell set up the system the boot flag had to be moved to a recovery partition and it worked fine. I'm wondering if Asus has something similar going on, but I can't figure out how to move the boot flag. I'm going on 12 straight hours of working on this now
I set it up so that I could access my E: drive from either the windows or ubuntu operating system. It has worked perfectly so far (about 6 months). But, here is the problem:For some reason as the share drive (my E: drive / sda3) grows Windows thinks that the windows system drive (sda2/c:drive) is also growing. So that now I have a low storage warning stating that there is only 8.76 GB of free space left on my 99 GB C: drive. When, in reality, there should be about 77 GB of free space. I've made hidden files/folders viewable and downloaded treesizefree so I know what should be on the drive. The Treesizefree output shows the expected 22 GB of space but also shows only 9 GB of free space. So, the missing space is nearly exactly the size of my shared drive (sda3/E:drive). So somehow, I think the windows OS is double counting my shared E: drive against my C: drive.
I just installed Ubuntu to make my computer dual boot with Windows 7. When the option in Ubuntu came up to install it along Windows 7, I selected it. Well, after the install my monitor pops up a box saying "Out of Range" and nothing comes up, then Ubuntu boots. I never get the option to boot Win7. If I hit a button while the monitor is out of range, nothing boots.
I had windows installed on a disk (sda) and decided to install ubuntu 10.10 in another disk (sdb). Ubuntu installed Grub2 boot loader in sdb and both systems seem to work fine. Except windows hibernation (which worked normally before the Ubuntu installation). What happens is this:
1. If I set the BIOS to startup from disk sdb, GRUB comes out. When I select windows and try to hibernate, the screen goes black and after a couple of seconds the log in screen appears. So, I can not hibernate windows when I use GRUB. By the way, ubuntu hibernates normally.
2. If I set the BIOS to startup from disk sda, windows load (without GRUB of course) and hibernate actually works. But when I turn on the pc windows resuming is the only option. I can not activate the bbs popup and even if I set bios to boot from the other disk (sdb) the system seems to ignore me and resumes windows without displaying GRUB loader.So, I can either hibernate windows but have to resume before I can use ubuntu or start windows using grub and not have the option to hibernate. From the above I get that windows 7 have a way of controlling the system's BIOS and prevent loading another os when windows are hibernated. I say windows 7 because my laptop has a similar dual boot (vista with ubuntu 9.04) and hibernation works for both systems and I can load whichever I want after that. I tried to find information about Windows 7 hibernation and bios but I couldn't find anything clear enough.
I have also tried EasyBCD but it didn't change a thing. I have already seen the posts about active partitions, boot partitions, boot flag (in ubuntu), turned off hybrid sleep, prevented all devices from waking up windows but nothing works. I started a thread ([ubuntu] Hibernate Problem in Windows 7 but not in Ubuntu 10.10 - Ubuntu Forums) since I though it was a GRUB2 problem but no one seemed to know what to do (or no one cared)... So, I' m left with the above assumption (windows 7 controlling bios).
i want to dual boot Linux and windows 7 (whats already installed )
i have 2 hdd one with windows 7 installed on(c drive) and drivers etc . and on my second one i have my media .
so my question is if i make a partition on my c drive and install Linux as well will i still be able to access my media on the second hard disk if i boot Linux or windows 7 .
I have Ubuntu dual booting on Windows 7. After the bios load, is there anyway that I can make Windows 7 boot right away without selecting anything on the OS selection? The same way it would boot without dual boot...if that makes any sense.If the above exists: Let's say I use Windows 7 all the time, but one day I decide to boot into Ubuntu. Is there a way that I can press a button, before Windows 7 loads, to make the OS selection come up?I tried to make myself as clear as possible and I hope that you understand what I'm trying to say.
I want to upgrade Vista to Windows 7, but without disturbing my Ubuntu installation, which is dual boot with Vista. I would prefer to do a clean install of Windows 7 over Vista, which has had niggling little issues (I resolve them and new ones appear) ever since I bought the pc. I don't have the recovery discs for Vista (the ones you make when you buy a new system) as they went missing during a major move.
What is the best way to accomplish all the above? Also, from what I understand, a clean installation can be done with an upgrade version of Windows 7 as long as a previous version of Vista or XP is already on the machine?
I set up a dual boot of Ubuntu and Windows 7 on my lenovo u330 laptop a couple months ago and everything was working fine. That was till I found a problem with the wireless when switching from Ubuntu over to 7. I found that if I left the wireless off in Ubuntu and restart to 7, the wireless is completely disconnected in 7. Later I learned that if I enabled the wireless in Ubuntu and restart into 7, the wireless works fine. Now, the major problem is that the Ubuntu 11.04 update completely screwed the Ubuntu installation. The graphics nor the internet worked after the update so basically I'm stuck with the wireless off in Windows 7.
Also, I deleted the Ubuntu partition to possibly reinstall it but another problem is that I got the install from a friend (who isn't around). Someone told me that Ubuntu actually shuts down the wireless card at the hardware level. Any low level way of enabling the wireless adapter in Windows 7? ipconfig gives me the "Media disconnected" message on all of the adapter connections. I have already tried reinstalling wireless drivers as well and none of the Windows 7 troubleshooting apps work whatsoever.
I've Linux Debian installed at my workstation. We are not allowed to remove it. But I would like to make the system dual-boot. Debian Lenny is already installed, How can I safely install Win7RC along with the Debian without losing any of the files/system/partition etc.
I am thinking about dual-booting my system with Windows 7 as the main OS, and linux ubuntu as a secondary. I have a few questions:
1. How much space should I leave for ubuntu's partition? 2. How do I make a swap partition (or whatever it is called, for swapping files between OS's)? 3. Can I set it up to automatically boot into windows unless I am holding down a specific key, or something similar?
BTW, my HDD is ~500gb, but my current (factory) windows partition is 450gb.
Is it possible to dual boot windows 7 and ubuntu, with ubuntu on a external hard drive? I can connect my external hard drive via USB 2.0, USB 3.0 or E-SATA. I want windows 7 as my main OS.
I read that if you have Windows 7 installed, it ruins Ubuntu. I want my computer to have both, so I was wondering, how can I dual boot them without them clashing? I don't want to use Wubi, by the way.
I have a Toshiba laptop that came with a preinstalled copy of Windows-7 (64 bit) version purchased in July 2010. No setup disk came with the laptop, but there is a "Toshiba recovery media creator" utility. Now, I want to format my laptop, and here I have few queries regarding this:
[1] What is the better option for formatting my drive? Should I use the Toshiba media-creator or install a clean version of Windows-7 from an ISO download (am I allowed to do that? If so, what is a good site to download?) There is a "sticker-certificate" on the bottom of my laptop with a product-key. Will it work with the new install?
[2] Do I have the option of installing a 32-bit version of Windows-7 instead of 64-bit with the above license? The reason is that most applications I use are 32-bit and hence a 32-bit OS is better suited for me. But does the license allow me to do that?
[3] (The tricky part) - Since I have a good 320GB HDD, I want to dual-boot by creating two partitions - with a linux distribution (Ubuntu/openSuse) running on the second partition? Assuming I don't have the option of clean-install, will I be able to create the extra partition for linux using the Toshiba utility?
Ok so I am running two operating systems at the moment: Windows 7 Ultimate 64x and Ubuntu Linux 9.10
I have them both in my dual boot menu, but I have a question as to how to organize them.
I recently visited this thread: Dual-Boot Windows 7 64-bit and 32-bit
...and they were basically explaining how to set your default boot OS to Windows 7. Well, I kinda have the same problem, except for when I follow the instructions on that thread, I get to the part where it tells you how to set it to default, but the only OS that shows up is Windows 7. It does not show any sign of Ubuntu whatsoever. Is it because I have to have a WINDOWS OS or what? But I would like to organize my boot menu to where it highlights Windows 7 as the first boot option rather than Ubuntu because I want Windows 7 to be the first OS on the list. Any help on how to make that happen, if possible?
I had Ubuntu installed on an external HDD, but back when I had XP, I formatted it for general storage. Now I'm running Seven and I have no idea how to remove the Ubuntu option from my Dual Boot menu.
I have Windows 7 RC1 installed for some time, dual-booting with Windows XP. And that worked like a charm. But a couple of days ago I installed Ubuntu on the Windows XP partition (after formatting it with ext3, of course). But the thing is, I have been trying to boot into my dear Windows 7 ever since, with no success.
It didn't show in the boot manager, so I changed the menu.lst in Ubuntu. Thus it can be seen, but to no avail, as it does not work. I have tryed fixing it with the Windows 7 installation DVD, but it did not work. And I really ran out of ideas; also I would like to keep both my OS-es as they are (all data), if that's possible somehow.
Ok so I have Windows 7 and Ubuntu desktop installed on my HDD. I used gparted and deleted my ubuntu partition and set it NTFS. But I forgot about the GRUB loader. Now when I boot up, I get the "error 22".
Anyways, how do I set it so I can just boot Windows 7?
Also! I'm on a netbook so it has to be a USB method.
I have a small query about this whole partitioning business. I'm trying to set up a partition so I can dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu.
My computer came with a Dell Recovery partition and an OEM partition as well as the main C: drive, which are all primaries. I've created a new logical drive, which I've called Z:, with the idea being to install the Linux OS in that chunk of the drive.
My first question: First up, I've formatted it as "exFAT" - is this the same as FAT32?
Next question: can I divide this 'Z' into smaller chunks with different formats, or do they all have to be the same format? I was hoping to be able to format a small bit of the drive into a Linux file-system so that both OSs can be kept entirely separate from each other, but leave the bulk of it as FAT so that I can see my files with both OSs. If this is not possible, what would be the best way to achieve the desired result?