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I have had Ubuntu installed on my laptop now for a while, I have also been switching distros. Now that I want to install windows back again I am having a problem:

I have tried making a bootable windows sd card with my windows 8.1 .iso file (which I checked and it works on Virtualbox). I tried the dd method (in the terminal) and disk image writer (both used to work for me fine with other linux iso's).

It seems to have writen the .iso file successfully, however when I boot from the sd card in the BIOS, it doesn't recognise the OS and boots back into Ubuntu. I also tried this with Windows XP and Windows 7.

Is this a partition problem?

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  • Do you have UEFI enabled in your BIOS Setup? If no, do so and try again.
    – s3lph
    Apr 7, 2015 at 16:30
  • I don't have a UEFI/Legacy option in my BIOS.
    – Radek Wojcik
    Apr 7, 2015 at 16:39
  • @RadekWojcik can you try the above link and report back here if it works or not? If it does not work then this can remain as a separate question.
    – RolandiXor
    Apr 7, 2015 at 18:17

2 Answers 2

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I don't know whether Windows 8 improved over the year (or decades in Windows terms of the smallest time step to introduce basic improvement), but in Windows 7 a reliable way is to

  1. create recovery disk of Windows with Windows[^1]
  2. make a full dd image of the HDD(s)[^2], e.g. from an Ubuntu live (this allows you to do 1. in VirtualBox on Ubuntu later)
  3. Repartition as you want with gparted in the live system (change the partition table to GPT if you have time and copy back the partition from the dd image) (you might need to boot into windows to run the filesystem check tool because ntfs-3g can't fix some issues and gparted will refuse to resize)
  4. Install Ubuntu on the HDD. If Windows has been on a separate EFI partition and the order of partitions and labels didn't change, Windows should be recognized when running update-grub (which is invoked automatically during the installation process) and you should be able to boot windows. Otherwise you might need to repair Windows with the recovery disk, overwrite grub and then from a live system reinstall grub in a chroot (all these steps have the effect to force Windows EFI setup to move to a separate EFI system partition).

[^1]: On some setups (of some manufacturers) some magic seems to be added and before you figure this out in an unfree system it's easier to go that way

[^2]: In one of my cases an ASUS came with no separate EFI service paritition and in order to create on for you proper Ubuntu setup I'd have to figure out how to extract the EFI files from the OS partition

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  • I don't have windows installed at all, but I'm trying to boot into the installer...
    – Radek Wojcik
    Apr 7, 2015 at 16:56
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Use either a DVD or a USB stick of flash drive, I don't think an SD card will work for that, even a USB has to have the ISO made into a bootable USB, not the method as setting up a VM check out this link How can I create a Windows bootable USB stick using Ubuntu?

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  • I will try using a DVD (although the sd card worked for me with linux distros?)
    – Radek Wojcik
    Apr 7, 2015 at 16:47
  • -1 What is a "USB"? USB is the abbreviation for "Universal Serial Bus". Please try to refine your answer and I will remove my vote.
    – A.B.
    Apr 7, 2015 at 18:31

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