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Dear Ubuntu Community,

I currently have windows 10 installed on a 500GB SSD and would like to install Ubuntu 20.04LTS onto another 2TB SSD to eventually have a dual boot system. Can I install ubuntu on the 2TB drive by choosing the 'Erase Disk' option and only selecting the 2TB drive, while leaving my Win10 on the 500GB intact? Allowing the Ubuntu installation to handle the partitioning?

This beginners guide seems to outline this option as a possibility:
"For erasing a disk, you'll get to choose which disk in the following screen. If you have that spare drive installed, just choose that and let Ubuntu do all the heavy lifting and auto-partitioning."

I am still not confident on going with this route since many threads have pointed out using the 'something else option' Thread1 Thread2 Thread3 Thread4

Alternatively, I would prefer not to disable or unplug the drive that has the Win10.

Many thanks in advance! Any guidance is highly appreciated.

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  • If not able or willing to disable Windows drive, only use Something Else. Auto install seems to do its own thing and we are never sure where it goes. With Something Else you also get the option to have a smaller / (root) & larger /home. Default install is just /, so a 2TiB / would be way too large. You may also want data partitions. UEFI/gpt partitioning in Advance, new versions do not need swap partition: askubuntu.com/questions/743095/… & askubuntu.com/questions/343268/…
    – oldfred
    May 5, 2020 at 20:10
  • Do not use the Erase Disk option if you care anything about Windows. Be best to remove SSD if possible to make sure of no oops. Use Something Else and double check everything. Back up of Windows data is also good to do first.
    – crip659
    May 5, 2020 at 21:02
  • Carefully and completely read every screen. Write down decisions you make, values you type in, defaults you accept and Passwords (eat later) that you type in.
    – waltinator
    May 5, 2020 at 21:07
  • I suggest you read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-on_self-test , en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS , en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record , en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table , en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI .
    – waltinator
    May 5, 2020 at 21:15
  • Thank you everyone! @oldfred, thank you for those resources, would you happen to know of other resources on how I should appropriately partition this drive to have it ready for something like bioinformatics? I.e., how much space I should allocate for /, /home, /temp, /var, and any other directories I might need? Can I somehow emulate the partitions that are on my mac?
    – Rama Pranadinata
    May 6, 2020 at 16:11

2 Answers 2

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I have done this before with another ssd and it when I erased the disk it only cleaned the disk that I chose it to. It will install a boot loader into the main disk when you do this so when your computer starts up you can select between Windows or ubuntu (or any other operating systems). If you unplug your main ssd while your computer is starting up then you may (not 100% sure) have to choose ubuntu as the main disk when starting up. If you are fine with this then feel free to unplug it, but if you want to be safe when choosing the os then I suggest you to keep both plugged in. Also, as a suggestion you should probably make sure it is the drive the you want to erase because there is no going back once you have done it. You could also setup the boot loader after you install ubuntu manually.

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The safest will be to use select the 'Something Else' option in the Installation Application and point to the 2TB disk for installation of Ubuntu OS and point to the existing EFI partition for installation of the bootloader.

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  • Great I will do that, thank you. Is it pretty straight forward to point to the existing EFI partition? That is, will the existing EFI most likely be in /dev/sda such as the example in this thread/ askubuntu.com/questions/274371/…?
    – Rama Pranadinata
    May 14, 2020 at 23:56
  • Yes, since you have Windows on the first drive, efi will be in /dev/sda
    – gdesilva
    May 16, 2020 at 9:38

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