Im running Windows 7 right now and I would like to know if I can set up dual boot running Ubuntu? Is the process gonna be the same just like with Vista? I wouldnt venture into Linux land but I’m having issues with running Blender under Windows 7. This is due to bad beta ATI drivers. Once Windows 7 is released these things will be ironed out.
I do not want to do any tweeks to GRUB through my terminal because I do not know much about computers. So basically if it cant be done from GUI dont worry about it.
Also that ATI driver pack for W7 does not apply to me. I have ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256-MB
Presumably, If you install Ubuntu AFTER windows, it should handle windows 7 as it would any other secondary OS: With a little GRUB menu that lets you pick which one you want every time you boot.
I’m not too sure because I’ve never set up a dual-boot system myself, but I think GRUB finds your OS’s automatically if they’re properly installed on separate partitions.
If you only have one hard drive, making dual boot is harder, due to the constraints on partition numbers. When you install Ubuntu it will install grub to the first hard drive, including all the other OSs on your computer. You need to beware though. Doing this has a bit of risk: if you screw something up in Linux, GRUB might not work correctly, and you won’t even be able to boot into windows (this can be fixed fairly easily if you have your install disk). A security measure around this is to make a separate /boot partition (away from / and /home); you cannot do this because of Windows 7 will already be taking a partition.
If you have two hard drives, one for Windows and the other for Ubuntu, then if you make sure to install GRUB to the very same disk as Ubuntu (press Advanced at the end of installation and choose the correct drive and partiton), the Windows drive would not be touched. This way if either OS dies (or you decide to remove it), the other will not be harmed. With to drives, you have more freedom in partioning, allowing you to give Linux a / /home SWAP partitions.
You won’t have to do anything scary with GRUB, it finds your other OSs automatically. The only thing I do is clear out old kernel entries that bog it down (only after seeing that they are bootable!), and that is easily done in a text editor.
I did install Ubuntu after Vista, and also I installed it after XP. Both times I had no issues. I did read on one website that there is a little difference between xp and Vista because Vista has a new bootloader. Im afraid that W7 is gonna have a new one also and that im gonna end up messing up my system. I dont think many people have done this because W7 is in early stages. Thanks
I had vista installed and then I installed Ubuntu by resizing windows partition. Just before I installed W7 I formatted Ubuntu partition from Vista. I was able to restart the computer booting into Vista with no issues. So basically everything was deleted including GRUB.
Yeah, it should be fine, but if you know what GRUB did, it is a bit alarming.
Your MBR (master boot record) tells where the first bootable sector is, so that the computer can load the OS from there. When you install Windows (or get a computer with Windows), the MBR points to Windows. When you install Ubuntu, it installs GRUB to hd0 by default. It overwrites the MBR to point to GRUB. This means that if something breaks in Linux, and the computer is refererred to GRUB which might not work, making you unable to boot into Windows. That is pretty unlikey, but this also comes into play if you decide to remove Ubuntu, as it will not return the MBR, and the MBR will point to GRUB which no longer exists. You have to return it to work with Windows by using your Windows recovery console on the install disk.
The key is, make sure you know where GRUB is going. I had a nightmare when I installed Ubuntu to an external drive (default bootloader location); I shut down, popped out the drive, and tried to start up… nothing.
I have two drives. Can I just disconnect windows hard drive and install on the other one? Then connect it back. Ill have to see if there is anything in bios that lets me select the boot drive I want at every start up.
Though if you do it like this, GRUB won’t add entries for Windows (which is unnecessary if you’re okay with choosing boot through BIOS). You could keep both drives connected, and make sure to install GRUB to the Ubuntu drive, and then change the BIOS to boot the Ubuntu drive first, which will show you a menu to choose OSs. If something breaks, you can just go change the boot order in the BIOS back to booting the Windows drive first.
If you are unsure and want to play it safe (and are okay with using the BIOS to switch OSs), your plan is the way to go.
My CMOS settings allow me to switch the boot drive, and this works very well for dual booting in my experience.
I installed my main operating system (Linux Mint) on the main drive, then rebooted and switched to the secondary drive and installed Windows XP. All I have to do to boot into either OS is switch the boot drive in the CMOS, and that’s just about as easy as using GRUB or any other bootloader.
I would personally recommend this method if your CMOS settings allow it.
Yes I have it installed and everything seems fine. Is it possible to get your Bios to prompt you for a boot device? Going into cmos everytime is painful.
Perhaps, but I haven’t seen that before. You could just choose which you want to take precedence according the which you will be using more often. Personally, although I have both Windows and Linux, I hardly ever boot into Windows, so I have my Linux drive higher up. If I do want Windows, I can either unplug it, or I can use the GRUB (which won’t work for you I guess, since you installed Ubuntu without the Windows drive?).
If you have a winders and linux drive both with their own mbr all you have to do is add a line in your grub.conf (or /boot/grub/menu.lst on ubuntu) for the windows partition on the other drive and everything should be peachy.
Be something like this;
title Windows Vista/Longhorn (loader)
root (hd0,1)
savedefault
makeactive
chainloader +1
You just have to figure out which drive it is in grub speak. Easiest way I know to figure out the disk partitions is to run ‘sudo fdisk -l’ in a terminal and look for the one that says NTFS or whatever W7 uses these days.
They probably have a way to reconfigure grub to automatically add your winders drive using apt-get but I don’t know how that works.
Thank you for your help but like I said if I cant do things without using GUI forget about it. Half of what you wrote is gibberish to me. I like to be able to click on things and click ok once im done. That is the only way that makes sense to me.
I think Im fine running it like this tho. I just wont boot into Linux that much as I dont get that much time for Blender. Thanks again.
if you are afraid of command line better dont try linux. even in the best user-friendly linux - ubuntu you have to use the command line sometimes.
and i hope you know that there is no good software for sound and video editing. but it does not matter when you compare the prices. also Blender runs faster on linux. it will be much faster if you build your old kernel with distro like Gentoo (but you need skills for that). to use blender on linux without any problems you have to run the official (closed source) video drivers.
good luck with linux and may the Torvads be with you ;D
I’m actually surprised there isn’t a gui to manage grub. They probably include one and I just don’t know what I’m looking for.
I’m the opposite, I hardly ever use gui wrappers to edit config files. Been using linux for almost 10 years now and they either didn’t have a gui or it would make a mess of the file if you tried to edit it by hand and also use the gui to manage it before the last couple years so I just learned how to do it the other way. Well, I was also using freeBSD for a year or two in the middle there.
I am getting better though, I’ve been starting to use the little gui do-dads here and there when they get included in gnome and haven’t compiled a kernel in years…
Don’t worry, GRUB configuration is gibberish to many of us.
All you need to do is open a terminal (press Alt F2, and type gnome-terminal), and type sudo fdisk -l | grep -i NTFS
sudo allows you to elevate your privileges; it will prompt you for your password.
fdisk is a program that allows you to manipulate hard drives and partitions. passing the flag -l with no arguments tells it to list the information about each partition.
| is the pipe, which tells Linux/Unix to give the output of fdisk -l to the program grep
grep is a string searcher, it will print out all lines with the word NTFS (the windows hard drive formatting type), and it will ignore case due to the flag -i).
Then again, there is probably a way to find this in a GUI. Unfortunately I am not in Linux at the moment due to work, but I am willing to guess where you might find it. If all is well and good, Ubuntu should mount (make active and usable) your Windows hard drive. If you open Nautilus (the Gnome file browser) through Places>Computer, there might be a disk called xxx.xx GB Media or something, check to see which one is your Windows one (assuming it is there). Then you ought to be able to right click on it and get its properties.
You are looking for the location of the disk. It may show /dev/sda1 or something similar. Then you need to covert it to the way GRUB sees it.GRUB counts from 0, and it counts both the drives and partitions. a would be 0, b would be 1, and so on. Thus if the drive is sda, it would be hd0, sdb, hd1. Then you need to add the partiton number as well (just subtract 1 from the /dev name). So if your windows drive is indeed /dev/sda1, then you would need to use hd0,0.
Once you have the name of the drive in GRUB-speak, then you just add what Uncle Entity said to /boot/grub/menu.lst. I like to use command line programs like cat or vi, but you can just as easily do it in Gedit, the Gnome equivalent of notepad. Just type sudo gedit (again, we need administrative privileges to edit system files), and open the file /boot/grub/menu.lst. I would make a backup of it first, /boot/grub/menu.lst~ so do a save as or something. Then just copy and paste what Uncle Entity said, changing the disk location after root if necessary, and changing the title if you prefer a different name.
Save a boot into the Linux drive. If it loads GRUB (if all went well), try booting into Windows from there. If all is well, you can change the boot order in the BIOS to boot the Linux drive first, bringing you to GRUB, where you can choose to boot either OS.
@egan, thanks man but I think I’m gonna keep it like this.
@ this last reply, yes Linux comes way short when it comes to audio and video editing. Audacity is for basic things and it never worked for me under Linux. This is one of the reasons why I decided to go back to Windows. Half of the apps didnt work or they had about 10% of features of what windows apps have.
