Ubuntu + Vista?

Leodido

Leodido

Leodido

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I decided that i'm going to switch to Ubuntu for my main OS but i also want Vista so i can play games sometimes, i already studied a little bit linux so i know how it works but i'm really not familiar how to put in place a dual boot feature? Which OS shall i install first? and how do i enable dual boot? hope someone can help me! ;)
 
Install vista first, then ubuntu. Ubuntu uses something call grub which should automatically detect vista and add it to the boot menu. Assuming all goes well you shouldn't need to do anything in that respect. The ubuntu installer also uses gparted which can shrink the vista partition down and create partitions for linux. You should backup your personal files when you shrink the vista partition, just incase anything goes wrong and gparted corrupts the partition.

As for hard drive space that depends on how much you have in total. If you play a lot of games you'll want a fairly large partition for it. Also when you make the partitions for ubuntu it's recommended to have a fairly small partition for the ubuntu os and programs (called " / " ) and a large partition for all your personal files (called /home). This is so if anything does go wrong with your install you can reformat the ubuntu partiton and keep all your personal files.

Best of luck :)
 
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Have you got any links to these posts? Vista will clear the mbr if it is installed after ubuntu, but it shouldn't just replace it for no reason. That said, I don't use vista on a regular basis so perhaps it does do something like that. Many people seem to be perfectly happy dual booting ubuntu and vista though...

Grub can be quite easily restored anyway but it requires some experience of linux.
 
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if vista deleted grub it is easy to get it back, its if grub deletes mbr that it gets hard!. the ubuntu live cd can be used to re-intall grub in a matter of seconds.
also have a look on softpedia at a fully encrypted ubuntu install!
 
Okay guys thank you :)
after a few investigation im going to do it now, going to format my 50gb drive where is XP and install Vista there then resize vista main partition to 30Gb letting 20Gb for Ubuntu.

About dual boot i found this site on the ubuntu forum looks like it works perfect : http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Ubuntu
 
I could be totally wrong here but...

Am I right in thinking that those instructions end up with Ubuntu added to the Vista boot loader, and not with Vista added to grub?

I'd like to try dual booting but I really don't want to mess around with my Vista install and would rather it remained, well, dominant. So if I wipe all of the linux partitions it's just a case of taking a line out of the Vista loader, and everything's back to normal.

I hope that made sense.
 
Reading about that... if it doesn't modify partitions, is it basically just a VM running ubuntu? I'm not really opposed to creating new partitions, I'd rather do it that way in fact. It's just I don't want to run Vista from grub.
 
i did what was instructed on this page.
Actually Easy BCD is a windows bootloader, what you do is install ubuntu AND it's bootloader on another partition than the one where is Vista, then you boot into Vista and you tell him that you have a linux partition there, then when you boot, first is the Easy BCD bootloader that is launched, in there you have an option to launch Linux, that will actually launch Grub bootloader from ubuntu, i did this because i heard report where Vista would redo the mbr when it noticed that grub was messing with it so that is the only way i found to prevent that. It works perfectly :)
 
Thanks for clearing that up :)

I'm typing this from a wubi install at the moment. Just to see what it was like. Next I'm definitely going to go and do what you have I think.
 
works really well, just dont do like me and read correctly where you have to install the ubuntu bootloader :p else you'll have to reinstall ubuntu once more!

ps: Wubi's like Wmware virtual machine i guess?
 
I thought it would be, but it's a proper install. It adds Ubuntu to the Vista boot loader and you boot into one or the other. The only difference is that the file system is virtual. There's a (I think) .drive file in my Ubuntu partition, which is currently formatted with NTFS. The Ubuntu install reads it as, I'm guessing, an ext 2 or 3 partition. I don't recall seeing a choice of format.
 
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