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So I've scoured a lot of different articles and I think I have a decent idea of what to do here but I'm hoping someone will be willing to hold my hand a bit here.

I've been running 12.04 as a wubi install on my Windows 7 box, and I'm ready to bite the bullet and make the switch. I recently purchased a 120gb Samsung 840 EVO SSD to use as the boot/OS drive, and will be changing my current primary HDD (on which resides the Windows 7 install and 12.04 wubi install) to the secondary/data drive.

Main questions:

  1. Can I install Ubuntu onto the new drive easily from either within the Windows or Ubuntu environment or do I need to boot from CD/USB?

  2. I understand that swapping to the SSD is bad, so I want to make sure if I keep swapping on or high swappiness that I'm swapping to the HDD and not the SSD. How do I do this, and should I?

  3. I've seen a shell script for migrating an existing wubi install onto a new primary install, but I'm not sure if this is good to use for an SSD or if I should start from scratch for any reason.

Any other sagely advice is greatly appreciated!

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  1. You can, for example using Wubi on Windows, and I'm sure there is something like that in Ubuntu as well. However, this doesn't install Ubuntu on ext4 but on Windows' NTFS and is therefore not as stable and fast as a normal Ubuntu installation. It may even cause data corruption easier than when on ext4. I recommend you to use a CD or USB. It's really easy to install that way and you'll get the full Ubuntu experience.

  2. Swapping to SSD is not bad. It'll make swapping a faster (but I don't know if you can notice) and resuming from hibernate as well. However, SSD space is not so much as HDD space so if your SSD space is precious you should put your swap partition on your HDD. To do this, simply choose for custom partitioning during the installation and create a swap partition on your HDD. Ubuntu will automatically use it.

  3. I don't have experience with this one. It could work as Ubuntu isn't bound to specific hardware like Windows is. You could even put your HDD in a different PC and it'll still boot where Windows would give you a BSOD. However, as you come from Wubi I don't know if the fstab file (that mounts all file system) will still work. I would personally do a clean install.

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  • Thanks for the tips. I needed to boot without CD or USB for a host of reasons not worth getting into here, so I used Unetbootin to create a partition on my HDD with the 14.04LTS ISO and booted up into that, worked like a charm. I chose not to put any swap on my SSD, but I understand I can add it later if I want. I wound up simply doing a clean install onto the SSD, if for no other reason than I was running 12.04 on the wubi install and decided to do a clean 14.04 install on the SSD.
    – HeruRaHa
    May 12, 2014 at 21:14
  • You can add a swap partition or file if you want later. A swap file may be easier to add if you've already partitioned your disk. You can mark this answer as accepted if this was the info you needed. May 12, 2014 at 21:17

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