Ubuntu Dual-Boot Tutorial
I got a PM asking me, of all people, how to go about dual-booting Vista and Ubuntu, and after writing up a rather lengthy response, I figured I may as well post it here where somebody else might get some use out of it, too.
NOTE: Follow these instructions at your own risk. I STRONGLY recommend that you do some research through Google and Google Linux, as well as reading through the Ubuntu Forums, before attempting this. As your common sense should tell you, I'm not responsible if you mess up your computer trying this. As far as I know, everything in this post is correct, but it certainly won't hurt to double-check things.
I'm no expert at such things, but I have set up a dual-boot before on a few different machines. It's actually far easier than you might be thinking. First you'll need a working CD of the latest version of Ubuntu/Kubuntu. You can download the CD image from their site, HERE or have them send you CDs in the mail, they don't cost anything. Just burn the CD image to a CD using your CD burning program of choice. I've heard Alcohol120% works well. I used InfraRecorder I think. Make sure you burn it as an image and not a data CD, and also be sure to burn it at a slow speed (4x-8x) rather than maximum, as burning it at faster speeds can cause it to hitch during booting or installation, or just plain ruin it. Then you want to boot from the CD; you do this by putting in the disc and restarting your computer (before you restart, make sure the CD burned correctly by letting it run in Windows. It should pop up with a window telling you a little about Ubuntu, and listing a few programs you can use in Windows as well.). It should automatically boot from the CD.
If it doesn't, you have to set your BIOS boot order. Start up your computer, and watch with bated breath and lightning reflexes for that BIOS screen. Press whatever key is needed to get into your BIOS as soon as you see the screen (usually it says at the bottom of the screen what key to press, if not, or if you don't want to risk missing it the first five or six times, go here for a list of what keys to press for what BIOSes/computer manufacturers: LIST). In fact, start pressing it repeatedly as soon as you press the power button. That way you might actually get into the BIOS on the first boot. Then just find the setting for boot order, raise your CD drive to priority #1, and save and exit. Then put the CD in and restart.
Once Ubuntu loads up (it may ask you a few questions while booting, such as what language to use, what keyboard layout to use, screen resolution, etc., not sure if it still does that these days) go to the equivalent of the Start menu, look in I believe it should be the System, or possibly Utilities submenu, and find QTParted. That's what you'll use to partition your hard drive. You need a separate partition for Ubuntu to install to. You might want to do a little research on partitioning before starting. A quick Google Linux search should turn up plenty on that.
You will need to unmount your hard drive before partitioning. That's easy enough to do. Open Konsole (Linux equivalent of Command Line) and type:
This allows you to set a temporary password for root (su means switch/super user, do is obvious). After setting the password, type:
HTML Code:
sudo umount -f /media/sda1
This unmounts your hard drive so that QTParted can access it. Check to be sure it's unmounted with:
That should list all mounted filesystems.
QTParted is pretty easy to use, and if you have any questions there is plenty of online documentation. Using it, you'll need to resize your existing Windows partition, to about half the size of your hard drive, or two-thirds, depending on how much space you want for Ubuntu. I'd make sure you have at least 10GBs for Ubuntu. Then make a new partition in the newly opened-up space, however big you want for Ubuntu minus 1.5-2 times how much RAM you have. So say you have 2 GBs of RAM, save out 3.5-4 GBs space. Make the main (root) Ubuntu partition use the reiserfs file system. Then use that 3.5-4 GBs (relative to your RAM) to make a swap partition for Ubuntu. The file system type should be swap (It may say Linux Swap Partition or the like). This works like virtual memory in Windows. So say your hard drive is 100 GBs, and you have 2 GBs of RAM, you should have say: - Windows Partition - 60 GBs (NTFS)
- Ubuntu Root Partition - 35 GBs (reiserfs)
- Swap Partition - 4 GBs (swap)
- A small bit of leftover free space
With me so far? Good. It gets easier now. See that little icon on the desktop that says Install? Click that. Then just follow the steps until you get to the partition bit. Make SURE you opt to do that manually, or it could wipe out your Windows installation. All you have to do is select the fresh-made partition you just created a few minutes ago for the root partition, and the smaller (swap) partition for your swap partition. Then follow the steps and prompts from there. Should be a piece of cake, really. :D
PM me if you have any questions, or better yet, PM one of the other guys, like Ynot or possibly wasup or one of the other more Linux-savvy folk that frequent the Tech Talk forum. Also, if anybody sees that I said something wrong here, speak up; I don't want to be responsible for turning someone's computer into a nice paperweight with a shiny screen.
Hope this helps,
MoS
