How-to Dual Boot Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron and Windows (NT/XP/Vista)

Step one:

Say you have a 40GB hard drive. Install Windows choosing 20GB (or greater, but keep at least 10 GB for ubuntu). I am not giving screen-shots for the Windows installation, because i guess that everyone knows about that. The setup procedures are well explained there anyway, but if you have any problems, post a comment, I shall edit this article.

Step 2:

Windows is installed. Now boot on your Ubuntu 8.04 CD in Live CD mode and launch the install icon that is displayed on the desktop.

Step3:

Enter your Time Zone settings:

Then, your Keyboard Layout settings:

Step 4:

This is the most important part. I will discuss the manual partitioning to avoid dramatic, irreversible cases where you lose everything in your other partitions. So, choose manual partition in the list:

(Note: The rest of the tutorial refers to Manual partitioning.)

Step 5:

Create three partitions out of the<i>free space</i> you can see.

One will be swap (set it to 512mb-this is more than enough)

The other one is a small ext3 partition (put it 50Megs) and mount it to /boot (Very important to do that!!)

Then the rest will be all the free space available; use ext3 as file-system and mount it to ‘/’

Step 6:

Proceed with the installation as you would normally. The most difficult part has been done. On reboot, you will notice a nice and beautiful Boot list.

Post comments if that helped you. This article will keep updating.

TJ- Helping the Free community yet again – Use Fedora..

Updates:

Added a screenshot of the manual partition window.

Article now focusses on dual booting Ubuntu Hardu Heron

First time Ubuntu 7.10 with Dual Boot.

Greetings,

If you are in a hurry and expert already, you may skip this piece of literature and hop to the next article which describes how to manually partition your hard-drive that already contains a windows NTFS partition. Okay guys, 7.10 was released today, and though I’m a Fedora/RedHat 100% fanatic, I have decided to test the new Gutsy on my Dell Optiplex 170L machine. To be frank, I never liked the Ubuntu Family. I reckon that Canonical and Sons are doing great charity by giving away Free CDs but really Ubuntu ain’t inspiring. I am not going to criticise the people who use it by any means nor belittle the the engineers behind Ubuntu.

Firstly, Ubuntu isn’t a name that vibes well in my ears (sorry for the pessimistic touch; Fedora sounds cool..RedHat as well..Novell a little, Suse a little as well..:), but not the African word Ubuntu. I don’t know why really. Is Fedora an American word? )

Anyway, I have got some really bad experiences in the past with Ubuntu. For instance, it will never install on my Acer laptop, taking hours and hours to go by the 7 steps of installation, and then hanging at 15% during disc partitioning. That was totally frustrating. It is during that time that I came to know RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 and adored it. It was great fun to set up LAMP, DNS, and web servers on the RedHat machine. I finally dropped Ubuntu completely; no more debian..

I appreciated RedHat’s decision to supply DVDs with all the repositories unlike Ubuntu CDs which contained the strict minimum. Furthermore, you need to have a good bandwidth to start downloading all your favourite software, updating them etc..

A month later, I laid my hands upon the Hot Fedora 7. That was the beginning of a new linux adventure. I had all my servers (apache and postgresql amongst others) working perfectly while my friends still on debian were struggling. (That made me happier..lol)

And just to get a touch of debian again (sadly, you have to know everything in this world..-_-’ ), I have downloaded the new Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 on the launch date itself ( I guess I’m the first one to get it in my country…lol..ok just kidding), trying a dual boot with my Windows XP Service Pack2. After 4 setup trials, I finally managed to get GRUB working (yeah Dual Booting in Ubuntu ain’t friendly at all, unlike in RedHat which detects windows partitions right during setup, and asks you how you want your bootloader to be..).