Installing Ubuntu at my laptop (having windows 7 already - dual boot)

Question

I want to install Ubuntu (11.04) at my laptop wich already has windows 7.
The laptop has one HDD which came with 3 partitions.One hidden for the recovery(ASUS)
the one as the partition for the OS(150GB) and the other as DATA.I've shrunk the latter
and created unallocated space of about 25GB for Ubuntu.

Now the step to follow is to boot into Ubuntu live cd that I have and after that install ubuntu.
How to properly select the unallocated space to install it(and be sure that I am selecting that and not any data)?
When I should install grub? Which grub? (2/Legacy)? And how should I do that?

Thank you for your time!

Answer 1

I actually did the same just yesterday on my brother's laptop (clevo machine with a 300GB HDD):

• I first installed Windows 7 on an NTFS partition with 170GB of space. I also created a second NTFS partition as a backup with 100GB of space, leaving 30GB totally unconfigured/unpartitioned for Ubuntu (170GB C:\, 100GB D:\, 30GB # future Ubuntu partition #)
• I booted up from the Ubuntu CD and when the installation proceeded to the partitioning/drive space allocation options, i was presented with the following screen:

• I just selected the first option Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7.

When the setup completed, i just rebooted and everything was ok.
Grub installed, dual boot working just fine ;-)

---

If you want to change the default O/S when booting, you can do one of the following:

The "hard" way:

From a shell, type:
cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg | grep menuentry

You will get a list of all the entries in your grub menu.
Count them starting by zero (0), e.g.

menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-10-generic' .... <-- #0
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-10-generic (recovery mode)' .... <-- #1
menuentry 'Windows 7' .... <-- #2

Then, edit /etc/default/grub and change the entry GRUB_DEFAULT=X to the number you want (like #2 above for Windows).
Save the file and do a sudo update-grub in order to update grub.cfg.
You're all set.

The "easy" way:

Install StartUpManager by typing:
sudo apt-get install startupmanager

This application provides a GUI in order to make all the changes you need.

More information can be found here

Answer 2

Installing Ubuntu is very simple. When you want to install it onto your HD, the installer will prompt you asking where you want to install it. I believe that you should choose the "Manual" option or something similar. There, you should see your unallocated space, and you can change it to ext4 (the default filesystem for Ubuntu).

Once you've formatted that partition, you can choose the new partition as your install base, and continue from there.

Grub will install by default just fine. No need to worry about configuring it.

Answer 3

So everything went smoothly with the installation! The only thing I want to change with grub is its default option. Its current is Ubuntu, but I want it to be Windows.

Answer 4

Well, I haven't tried changing the default OS option because I was formatting and restoring windows installation with all my programmes,settings,etc.

The problem now is that due to the format procedure grub was deleted.
What can I do to restore it?

I am using the EasyBCD at windows..There is an option "Add Entry" and then selecting the Linux/BSD tab.
There are the types:
1) GRUB (Legacy)
2) GRUB 2
and some other which I am sure that are not what I want.

Additionally, it asks for the device:
1)Partition 1 (100MB - System Reserved)
2)Partition 2 (OS Partition made by me - windows are there)
3)Partition 3 (Data is there)
4)Partition 4 (Linux - 25GB)
5)Partition 5 (Swap - 4GB)

Which one should I choose?

Thank you!

EDIT: I managed to do it selecting the 2nd option (Grub 2).
Now the only thing that troubles me is that at first there is the windows bootloader and if I select Linux grub is loaded. Anyway to have only grub as a bootloader?