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I've recently migrated from a MacBook Pro to a Lenovo ThinkPad e550 and I have some preliminary (extremely nooby) questions on getting started with my Ubuntu installation.

  1. On the Ubuntu website, it mentions that prior to beginning installation I should back up Windows on a bootable USB drive. I presume the purpose of this is in the case that I ever want Windows 10 back. The thing is I'm already familiar with Ubuntu (computers at my university have it installed) and I can't think of a scenario in which I'd want Windows back, or a scenario in which I'd want to dual-boot. What is your recommendation?

    In the case that I decide to do the bootable USB drive, what would be a proposed step-by-step guide for me to accomplish it? Buy USB drive and follow guide on the Windows website?

    In the case I choose to forego the bootable USB drive, is there anything I should keep in mind?

  2. I keep hearing the word partition, what does this mean? I'm fairly certain I don't want to share my disk drive with Windows, would a partition apply to my scenario?

  3. Lastly, I don't know if this is the right place to ask and excuse me (or direct me) if it's not the right place, but prior to the loss of my MacBook (water damage incident), I had all my files backed up on a Seagate external hard drive. How would I go about migrating my files to this laptop? Are there any special considerations since the backups were done by Time Machine on the Mac OS? Noobiest of all, every time I plug the hard drive into my laptop it doesn't seem to detect it?

  4. Bonus question. In the case of the bootable USB drive, would I be able to perform the backup of Windows on my external hard drive?

I apologize for my extreme lack of knowledge, I'm feeling rather lost so any answers/clarifications are greatly appreciated.

EDIT: Is there anything I should keep in mind to ensure the installation runs as smoothly as possible? Will I need to have a Ubuntu on a disk to install it?

2 Answers 2

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Welcome to AskUbuntu sofdelg!

Your questions seem totally legitimate to me, so I'll answer them.

1: Having a bootable Windows backup is only useful to be able to rollback to Windows should you decide that you don't like Ubuntu or it won't run for some reason on your machine. (Bleeding edge hardware has a tendency of not working properly with stable releases. Tough based on the specs of the Lenovo ThinkPad e550 I don't think you'll run into this sort of problem.)

So basically having a rescue disk can be handy, but honestly I've never used a Windows disk for this purpose as I have a strong dislike (resentment?) towards that OS.

Still if you wish to use Windows for this purpose then this guide seems to do that.

A neat thing that some people seem to miss is the fact that you will likely install your Ubuntu from live media, and since that is also a self-contained system that can be booted it can be used for various repair purposes as long as you don't care about other OSes.

2: You might already be familiar with the concept of a "C: drive". This is in fact a misnomer as what people refer as c: is a partition on the disk.

Now don't get me wrong this isn't just a Windows thing, quite the opposite actually. A partition is basically just a piece of disk that you can mark with a "file-system type". For example on one of my disks the partition table looks like this:

Disk /dev/sda: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000db12c

Device     Boot  Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *      2048    295016    292969 143.1M 83 Linux
/dev/sda2       393214 976771071 976377858 465.6G  5 Extended
/dev/sda5       393216 976771071 976377856 465.6G 83 Linux

Basically the whole partition table is just a table at the start of the disk (after the main boot record), that indicates that which partitions starts where, how big they are, what type they have and whether they are bootable or not. If you wish to know more about this topic then this Wikipedia article seems to explain things excellently.

The gist of this is that yes, they do apply to you, but you (probably) won't have to worry about them as the installer can auto-create them for you, just pick something like "Use the whole disk" when that menu comes up. (Though you can have a lot of !!FUN!! by customizing stuff there.)

3: While this would be (probably) better suited as a stand-alone question, I'll answer it here as it's related to the previous question.

So by now you know that partitions have a type and that this type indicates their intended use. (Eg. the Linux in my above example means that said partition is intended to be mounted somewhere on /and is formatted with a Linux file-system - in this case ext4.)

Similar to the above your backups from the Mac reside on a disk that has been partitioned and formatted in a way that Windows (and even Linux) doesn't understand without additional drivers. According this Wikipedia article that file-system would be HFS+.

The good news is that Linux does have drivers to access your backups, and the procedure to mount it has even been asked here on AskUbuntu which I recommend you read through.

4: I believe trying to "back-up" Windows will likely format/overwrite/corrupt the drive and as such you will lose the things backed up from your Mac.

I can't recommend it unless you are entirely sure you don't need that data anymore.


I hope I managed to clear up some doubts you had.

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  1. You can get a bootable USB drive by using software like Pendrivelinux

It would basically act like a normal bootable CD, although I don't have much knowledge about bootable USB's since I've never used them.

  1. A partition is essentially a part of your harddrive. For example, you have a 500gb harddrive,and you want to dualboot Windows and another OS, you can create 2 or more partitions both with 250gb, so then Windows would have 250gb (in terms of installing and saving files) and the other OS would also have 250gb. For more info check this link.

3.Sorry, but I don't have much knowledge with backing files up either.

4.I think you can if you make a different partition for that.

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  • I'm fairly sure that Pendrivelinux allows you to create "a bootable Linux pendrive from an iso on Windows". And not create "a backup Windows from Windows".
    – Wolfer
    Oct 2, 2015 at 6:57
  • @Wolfer My bad, I thought it worked for any ISO. In that case, try Rufus rufus.akeo.ie Oct 3, 2015 at 14:59

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