Ubuntu Wiki

Note that these steps are mostly unneccessary; Ubuntu Hoary will automatically configure grub to boot windows, and the installer has the ability to resize NTFS filesystems. If you're looking at this page in preperation of installing Ubuntu Hoary or greater on a normal Windows PC, just go try it, you're unlikely to have to do anything special to get it to work.

This page has been rewritten from scratch to make it MUCH clearer!

Installing Ubuntu and Windows On the Same Hard Drive

• If Windows is already installed:
• Boot into Windows and backup any valuble documents/photos etc onto removable media such as CD-R/DVD-R
• Run the windows Defragment tool on C:\
• You will need to resize your Windows partition to make space for Ubuntu either using Partition Magic or a Knoppix Live CD
  • (using Gparted)
  If windows isn't already installed, install it first. Create a partition during install for Windows that fits in with your partitioning scheme (ie leave space for Ubuntu). Once Windows is installed:
• Download/burn or order CD

  • [http://www.ubuntulinux.org/download/:List of Download Mirrors]

  • [http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/:Order Ubuntu CDs] (currently free!)

• Once you have the CD, insert it into your CDROM drive and reboot your PC
  • If the computer does not boot from the cd (eg. Windows starts again instead), check your BIOS settings and fix as
    • approprate.
• If successfully booted from CD, the Ubuntu Logo will be displayed on the screen, press Enter to continue
• Select your location (language), press Enter to accept
• Select your keyboard layout, most likly American English
• The Ubuntu installer will then attempt to automatically detect your hardware and load the components of the Ubuntu
  • Installer
• Next the installer will attempt to set up your network connections using DHCP, unless you have a DHCP server on your
  • network it will fail, this is ok, press Enter to continue
• If you then wish to set up networking manually, do so
• Choose a hostname for your pc, it can be anything you like
• The installer will then detect your hard drives and load the disk partitioner
  1. Choose "Manually edit partition table"
     • Listed will be your current partitions, most likly Windows will be taking up the whole hard drive (listed as "ntfs")
  2. Select the ntfs primary partition and press Enter