Can't boot to Ubuntu 11.10 after installation with Windows 7

Question

I just installed Ubuntu 11.10 on a machine with Windows 7 already installed. I want to setup the dualboot environment.

I have a block of unallocated disk space at the end of the disk (some blog post suggested to do so). Then I started installing Ubuntu 11.10 on that part of disk. I installed the boot loader to /boot partition and the installation finished successfully.

However, after installation, Ubuntu 11.10 doesn't show up on boot menu. Then I searched on Internet and I used EasyBCD to add a grub2 boot to boot menu. After this, the boot entry does show up in the boot menu, however it only boot into some sort of grub console. I tried many times, and it doesn't work. It looks like the boot loader is not properly installed?

I only have one 1.5TB disk and the first 800GB is NTFS partition with Windows 7. Does this work?

Answer 1

Try pressing Esc right after you BIOS screen to access the grub menu, -> For single Boot OS

For dual boot, wait for the grup menu and choose "Recovery mode". After a successful login on recovery mode try to reboot and use the first one. Tried and tested on my machine :)

Answer 2

Unused space at end of disks usually 100mb or a bit more. Normal LINUX distro's usually reuire 5GB disk space minimum. some smaller on I seen was 250MB download. IT JUST CANNOT FIT into those unused space. You can SHRINK a partition using Disk management and make space for LINUX ( right click to my computer and select manage ...)