Ubuntu 9.04 and Windows 7 RC

TheFunkbomb · #1 May 6th, 2009, 12:47 PM

Good day,

I have a brand new computer and I'm trying to install a dual boot of Ubuntu 9.04 and Windows 7 RC. I already tried once and I bombed the whole thing out.

I am a bit confused as to what to do and I was hoping someone could help me.

Right now I am re-installing Windows 7 after a format.

I assume the next thing to do is to install EasyBCD in Windows.

Then I need to install 9.04.

This is where I get lost. Where do I install the grub boot loader? This is the part that bombed out my system before. When I rebooted, windows couldn't find their MBR and things got hairy.

Can anyone tell me a step by step on how to do this? Thanks.

Terry60 · #2 May 6th, 2009, 01:58 PM

Hi Funkbomb, welcome to NST.

During the Ubuntu install, you'll see an "advanced" button at the bootloader definition stage.
If you don't use it Linux will take over the boot and wipe out the W7 boot, which is presumably what you did previously. You could have fixed that (too late now of course) by simply booting the W7 DVD and using "repair your computer" \ "startup repair" 2 or 3 times to re-establish all the W7 boot components.

Simpler still, don't let Ubuntu take over the boot.
Hit "advanced" and you'll get another menu.
Tell it not to overwrite the MBR, but to install grub into the same partition as Ubuntu.

When you reboot w7, install Version 2.0 of EasyBCD, not 1.7 which is no longer compatible with the grub syntax changes since Ubuntu 8.04.

Follow the advice in the last point of the sticky thread about how to add a Linux entry to the BCD, which depends on whether Ubuntu is on the same disk as W7 or a different one.

nogoodreason · #3 May 6th, 2009, 03:00 PM

Looking at the screenshots in the easyBCD guide to dual-booting with Ubuntu, it looks as if the user has installed GRUB to the swap partition rather than the root.

Is this correct? I've installed mine to root... wondering if that was correct. :/

Terry60 · #4 May 6th, 2009, 03:11 PM

Yes, put it in the root with the rest of Ubuntu. The swap partition is just meant to be empty workspace like the pagefile in windows. Its contents are always transient.
I don't even have a swap partition allocated for Ubuntu as a result of a quirk (bug?) in the installer which kept failing whenever I pre-allocated the 2 partitions as primary and kept trying to make them logical. It would only install to a primary when I scrapped the swap partition altogether.

nogoodreason · #5 May 6th, 2009, 03:19 PM

Thanks for your reply, Terry. I'm new to Linux and dual-booting, so would appreciate any advice you can give.

Windows 7 and Ubuntu are both on the C: Drive. I made the root partition primary, and the home and swap partitions logical. It advised to make the swap partition twice the size of system memory. As I have 8 Gigs of RAM I made the swap partition 15.5GB. Taking into account what you said, is this way too big? I could always add some of that space to my root partition.

Terry60 · #6 May 6th, 2009, 03:31 PM

With 8Gb of RAM you'd have to be doing a lot of very intensive work to even need a swap space. My Ubuntu 9.04 runs just fine on 6Gb without one. You also have the option to add a swap file in Linux just the same as Windows. It doesn't have to be a separate partition, though that's the historic norm.
This post contains more detail.

TheFunkbomb · #7 May 6th, 2009, 04:37 PM

Terry, thank you so much for your reply. I'll give it another go after I wake up. Brand new computer. I had to stay up all night playing with it.