Where is Ubuntu installed?

Question

I installed Ubuntu 12.04 along with Windows XP. But now on the boot menu Ubuntu doesn't show up. I checked the drive in wich i installed Ubuntu, and that drive is also empty.. What do i do now?

Answer 1

Windows cannot see the contents of your Ubuntu partition

Ubuntu uses the Ext filesystem by default. Windows doesn't know what this filesystem is, so unless you specifically told Ubuntu to format its partition using NTFS (the Windows filesystem), Windows will see it as empty.

To see if the partition is actually empty, boot into your live CD again and see if it can see the contents of your Ubuntu partition. Chances are, it will. If not, then something did, in fact, go wrong with your installation and you should try again.

Grub is probably not loading right for some reason

Sometimes, Grub, the little program that allows you to choose which operating system, doesn't get installed quite right. (Sometimes, it conflicts with the Windows loader, which serves the same purpose.) There are a couple of things you can do to fix it.

1. Install Ubuntu again. This is kind of a nuclear option, but if it's a fresh install, anyway, it won't hurt anything. It would probably be a good idea to check the disk for errors before installing (you can find that option on the disk's initial menu).

2. Update/repair Grub. If you are comfortable, and can drop into a Linux terminal/command line environment, either through your boot menu, or through the Live CD, you may be able to update grub with sudo update-grub. Here's a similar AskUbuntu answer with step-by-step instructions on how to do this. This should fix any errors or conflicts encountered and re-establish Grub as the bootloader.

It could be some other edge-case problem

If you do one of the two options in the "Grub is not loading right" section and you're still not getting anywhere, it might be something like this problem, where OS Prober got disabled somehow.

Another possibility is that Ubuntu somehow didn't get added to Grub's menu list. This post explains how you can temporarily edit the command that Grub runs, which may allow you to boot into your Ubuntu install. From there, you can install a Grub customizer to edit your Grub list. This is a rather advanced option and so should probably not be used unless you've tried the above and are comfortable with the command line.

If none of these things work, then you'll probably need to post more information to this question so that we can better determine the underlying cause of the problem you're having.