Dual-Booting Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista

Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions available (for free, of course) on the market today, and has gained most of its popularity due to its ease-of-use and its appeal to people who don't like to wage war against their PC to make it work for them. In that respect, EasyBCD and Ubuntu are quite a like - it couldn't be any easier to get the two to play together nicely!

Step-by-Step Ubuntu, Vista Dual-Boot Pictorial

Here's a step-by-step screenshot guide to installing Ubuntu and getting it to be nice to Windows Vista's bootloader.

You can use these steps whether no matter whether you are installing Ubuntu before or after Windows Vista.

The Ubuntu Side of Things

1. Step One
   Insert your Ubuntu CD or DVD in the drive, and boot from it to begin setup. Choose "Setup Ubuntu" from the bootable menu. Double-click the "Install" icon on the desktop to get started, and you should see a screen like this one:
   
2. Step Two
   Follow the (fairly straight-forward) setup prompts until you get to a screen asking you for your preferred method of partition your hard drives. Make sure you choose "manual" at this point so you can configure your dual-boot exactly as you need it.
   
3. Step Three
   Find some free space on the drive (or resize/move existing partitions around to make some) and create a new partition there. Choose "ext3" as the filesystem type (note: no other filesystem will work), and "/" as the mount-point. "/" is Linux-speek for "Drive C:\" (the system drive) and mount-point is just a fancy way of saying "label" while looking real intelligent.
   
4. Step Four
   Once you've partitioned the drive the way you like it, you come to the single most-important step: telling Ubuntu where (not) to install GRUB, the Linux bootloader. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu developers did a real bad job here - you're going to see a single, lonely button dubbed "Advanced" with no hint as to what it actually does. Don't be put off by the intimidating label, there's nothing to advanced or complicated behind that curtain! Click that button, and proceed to the next step for an explanation.
   
5. Step Five
   Now is the time to tell Ubuntu that we don't want GRUB installed to the system bootloader. Instead, we're going to have Ubuntu install GRUB to its own partition, where EasyBCD can safely and easily read & interact with it, without too much hassle and absolutely no trouble. The default option is (hd#) where "#" is the number of the drive your installing Ubuntu to:
   
6. Step Six
   Instead of (hd#) (in our example it was (hd0), but it may be different on your machine) we're going to use /dev/sda1 - the partition we installed Ubuntu to.
   You can determine this number by looking at the drive Ubuntu is installed to in the on-screen text (as in the screenshot above) to get the sd* value, then suffix it with the partition number (starting from 1). So if it says sdb and it's the second partiton on the drive, enter /dev/sdb2 at that prompt.
   
7. Step Seven
   Congratulations! You've just finished installing Ubuntu and are on your way to becoming an official dual-booter! All what's left is to tell Vista that Ubuntu exists... and that is made pretty darn simple thanks to EasyBCD:
    

Adding Ubuntu to the Vista Bootloader

If you installed Ubuntu before Windows Vista, now would be the time to get your Vista DVDs out and install it to your PC. Once Vista installed, grab yourself a copy of EasyBCD and install it to get started.

1. Step 1
   Launch EasyBCD and go to the "Add/Remove Entries" page:
   
2. Step 2
   Choose the "Linux" tab from the bottom-half of the EasyBCD screen:
   
3. Step 3
   Pick the partition you installed Ubuntu to earlier from the drop-down partition list and choose "Add Entry"
   

All Done!

That couldn't have been any easier now, could it?
Now that you're an old-hand at dual-booting, we shouldn't need to tell you what comes next (hint: reboot to test!)

Optional Step For Smooth Dual-Booting

Once in Ubuntu edit /boot/grub/menu.lst:

gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Change

timeout 5

to

timeout 0

then save and exit.

All Done! (for real, this time!)

Welcome to the wonderful world of multi-booting. It's an excellent way to make the most of available resources - there's absolutely no need to have more than one PC just to use another OS. Use whatever OS is best for whatever task at hand - that's the golden rule of dual-booting, and one that we all live our lives by.

Drop by our forums and say hi, we'd love to hear about how your dual-booting experience is going!