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i5 4460 AsRock H97 Pro4 Kingston Hyperx 2x4GB MSI R7 260X EVGA 500W PSU Crucial MX100 128 GB SSD Western Digital CB 1 TB HDD

Anyways I decided to dual boot Ubuntu 14.04 and Windows 7 onto my SSD, which I have done successfully (GRUB allows me to choose the OS upon booting)! However I have a slew of questions that I hope this community can answer. Please bear with me :) To introduce myself I am an engineering student, and the reason I chose to do dual booting was to fit the needs of my various tasks.

  1. I want to have all my programs and files stored on the HDD, and have the SSD exclusively for OS and drivers. I want both Ubuntu and Windows to be able to grab files from the hard drive seamlessly.Basically I want to prevent any installations or files from saving to the SSD and redirect them to the HDD.

  2. Do drivers need to be installed on both OS's? I installed the MSI driver on Windows but it works fine on both Windows and Ubuntu. Just curious.

  3. In Windows I can only see the Windows partition in the Explorer however in Ubuntu I can see the Ubuntu partition in addition to Windows one. Why is that?

  4. Any other dual boot tips and tricks would be greatly appreciated

3 Answers 3

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In Ubuntu you cannot install programs on another partition but in Windows you can if you want a common partition to access files from windows and Ubuntu make one partition on your HDD as NTFS using Windows or gparted in Ubuntu, this partition would be accessible from both OSes. A FAT32 partition can only support 127GB of disk space on Windows XP so if you want a larger common partition go for NTFS.

As for Ubuntu drivers for your motherboard it has picked them itself unlike Windows where you have to specifically install all the drivers

As for your graphic card it is an MSI AMD Radeon R7 260X and you have a choice to install the fglrx proprietary drivers. Now you are using the open source X org Xserver drivers for display and not the proprietary graphic card driver.

Search for additional drivers from dash and choose your correct fglrx driver, click on it apply changes and reboot your system

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I think you got it all. An ssd with 240gb wouldn't hurt for dual boot. The additional 1tb HDD is a must have. Install all your software there.

However I recommend resize the 1tb HDD to 50% and create a Linux partition from Ubuntu on the empty part.

Like: WinPrograms and LinuxPrograms.

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  1. The native file system for Linux (Ubuntu) is ext4, which Windows does not support. Ubuntu can read and write to NTFS but with some limitations. So, what effectively happens is that Ubuntu can read Windows files but Windows cannot read Ubuntu files. So, the best thing I think, would be to have a separate FAT32 partition to share files between both OSes.

  2. Usually everything 'just works'on Ubuntu but you might need to install third party drivers for additional funcitonality on Ubuntu. Ubuntu drivers worked not because you installed the MSI drivers on Windows. The Windows drivers and Ubuntu drivers are separate. You will need to download different versions for both.

  3. Same reason as I stated for the first question. The difference in file systems.

  4. Congrats on getting everything working. You might like to visit here for some additional tweaks. It is best to install Ubuntu after Windows, but you can achieve it the other way round using a tool called EasyBCD.

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