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When I installed Ubuntu on my laplet (Tabtop?), I very explicitly selected my USB drive as the destination for GRUB. The laptop is natively a Windows 8 machine, and the idea was to not even touch the native bootloader, and instead have the machine boot to Ubuntu whenever I had my USB drive plugged in. Should work in theory.

Naturally, post installation, I tested this by removing the USB drive, and sure enough GRUB fired right up. Adding insult to injury, GRUB isn't able to boot Windows 8 at all, leaving me with an Ubuntu-only machine on a primarily touch-based device. Not fun.

I'm pretty sure I can figure out how to get Windows fixed; my issue is that it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Did I miss some magic checkbox in the installer? Is the installer perhaps bugged? (This was Ubuntu 12.10 btw.) There's a step in the installer where you select the destination for GRUB, and I checked and double checked that I had selected my USB drive (The same drive the installer itself was running from) for the install and it didn't complain. I'm not sure what I did wrong.

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  • Normally the installer does not give the option to install grub to the drive you are installing from. You must have chosen the wrong drive.
    – psusi
    Apr 1, 2013 at 18:31

1 Answer 1

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When you insert the installation medium for Ubuntu (e.g: USB Stick, CD-ROM), you will see an option to 'Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 8'. You also need to create a swap partition to be able to use Ubuntu. Look it up on YouTube. However, it has recently been highlighted that Microsoft has disapproved other bootloaders which are not their own. However, they have been fined for this by the European Commission due to stifling compedition and now have to allow different operating systems to be installed.

Hope that answered your question :)

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  • I usually manually set up my partitions; I don't trust automatically generated partition layouts, even if they're correct. And thank goodness Microsoft is getting fined for this practice; they need more than a slap on the wrist I say.
    – Blank
    Apr 1, 2013 at 17:54
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    This doesn't have a thing to do with the question.
    – psusi
    Apr 1, 2013 at 18:29

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