Ubuntu dual boot

guggas

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Nov 23, 2009
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I currently have a pc with one hdd and win7 64 installed. Is it possible/how difficult would it be to install ubuntu on my system and have a dual boot system? I don't really Need Ubuntu ,but I kinda wanted to install it because I have never used anything other than windows and I just wanted to try it. I was thinking this would likely involve partitioning my drive, but if it is better to have it on its own drive I have a spare drive laying around, but would prefer the partition method. Can I get some pointers on doing this?

p.s. If it is advantageous to install Ubuntu first, I could uninstall/reinstall win 7 without too much hassle.

thanks
 

toaksie

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Mar 29, 2010
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You need to make sure you have enough continuous free space first, which can at times be problematic with Win 7. First thing I would suggest is to run a full defrag of your system, then go Start > Control Panel > System and Security >Administrative Tools and look for Computer Management. Select Disk Management and then right-click the disk you wish to shrink and then Windows will calculate the maximum amount the drive can be shrunk by. Choose how much you want then clcik 'Shrink.' After this restart and load into Ubuntu live cd and click install when you come to the partition manager choose manually partition and then select the free space, adjust to leave 500mb-1gb free and put the mount point as / (root), then select the 500mb-1gb free space and select mount point swap, then proceed as normal, Ubuntu will find windows and add it to its own bootloader Grub as an option to load at startup.
 

MKII

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Mar 28, 2010
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The best way to resize the Windows partition is from the Ubuntu installer after defragmenting it as mentioned. I'm not even sure the Windows shrink option resizes the partition, I think it just creates a logical volume with the smaller size you specify.

There is a guide here that may be helpful: ;)
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WindowsDualBoot