Dual booted Ubuntu 12.04 with Windows 7. Question about boot order and where exactly Ubuntu has been installed

Question

This is a bit of a 2 parter:

I recently installed Ubuntu 12.04 on my Windows 7 PC. I had initially created some free space through diskmgmt.msc for Ubuntu to be installed to. I never formatted it, but it was left as ~30GB free space. When it installed I never actually got to pick where to install it to, it just installed. Now diskmgmt.msc shows that the ~30GB free space is now 2 Primary Partitions, 21GB and ~8GB. I would provide a screen shot, but new users cannot do this. The primary partitions however, seem to be totally empty.

My question is, did Ubuntu install itself here? If so, why is the free space marker still at 100% of the drive?

Part 2:

It now seems that Ubuntu is the primary OS, as I am presented with the "grub" screen when my PC boots, and when I leave it, it defaults onto Ubuntu, as opposed to the "aesthetically pleasing" black on white "what do you want to boot" screen.

I only use Ubuntu to play around with occasionally, or to write C++ in for university work. Is there a way of restoring Windows back to the primary boot, or is the easiest thing to do to uninstall Ubuntu, and re-install it again. How will this affect my Windows installation?

If I am to do this, how should I ensure that it installs to my 30GB set aside for this purpose, and that it is not my primary OS?

Sorry if this has been answered over and over again, I couldn't find an exact answer to my situation.

Answer 1

If this is not a Wubi installation...

Linux generally requires 2 partitions, a root partition and a swap drive, so the two partitions make sense. You actually would have had a lot of choices about where to put the installation and what partitions to use, but you probably chose a default, which may have worked out.

Whatever Linux installation you install last will be the default OS to boot, so reinstalling will not help. If you reinstall Windows, it will wipe out Grub completely, and you will not be able to boot Ubuntu, but it will still be on the disk.

You can set the amount of delay before booting, and also the default OS that boots. You can also set it so it boots the last OS you chose, until you boot a new one.

The default entry is determined by the GRUB_DEFAULT= setting in /etc/default/grub; the first "menuentry" has a value of "0". It can be changed to the number of the Windows entry in the menu, probably "3". Or, it can be changed to the full, exact name of the Windows entry, which is useful if you change things very much. To edit this file, you would enter at a command prompt: gksu gedit /etc/default/grub. Be careful not to change anything you don't understand, as this is an important file.

If you want to change the timeout that grub waits until booting the default, you can change the value for GRUB_TIMEOUT, which defaults to 10.

Note instructions at the top of the file about running "update-grub" after any changes to actually change the menu file at /boot/grub/grub.cfg. This file could also be edited to make the changes, but they will get overwritten on certain occasions.

More information can be found here.

Answer 2

How did you install Ubuntu? It seems like you might have done a Wubi install, which is installing a virtual drive inside of Windows. Boot windows and have a look to see if there is a folder c:\ubuntu\disks

Inside of this folder will be a file called boot.dsk. This is your Ubuntu Virtual disk.

If this is not the case, please boot Ubuntu paste the contents of the file /etc/fstab here so we can see what is going on.