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Thread: Windows and UBUNTU

  1. #11
    Gold Member irneb's Avatar
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    Oh, Yes. And if you go with dual-booting: It's not strictly necessary to have 2 discs. Just recommended. While installing an OS (most of them) there would be some feature where you can partition a single disc into multiple portions (i.e. splitting a disc into many drives). Performance-wise it wouldn't make such a big impact since the 2 OSs would not be running at the same time - i.e. the heads on the disc wouldn't constantly sweep back and forth between the 2 portions (partitions).

    It's actually a better idea to have the 2 discs split in any case (even with only one OS, no dual-boot) - say have your primary set as the System Disc with all your programs installed. Then you can have the secondary contain your data. The benefit here is that the 2 physical discs can read/write concurrently - making performance a bit better. So on a dual-boot with 2 discs I'd actually partition the primary to hold both OSs (one OS per partition), leave the secondary as a partition formatted with NTFS so both Windows & Ubuntu can read/write to it for data storage.

    The Grub thingy is simply a boot-manager installed by Linux (and most other OSs like BSD/Unix). Windows has a similar feature in itself - it just looks different. Though I'd recommend installing Windows first and then Linux - the windows boot manager tends to not work too well with anything but itself. Grub needs hardly any manual settings at all when you install Linux last, it simply checks what is on all your drives / partitions and creates a menu option for each (automatically). The last one installed would overwrite whatever boot-manager is already on your PC.
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  2. #12
    Gold Member Chrisjan B's Avatar
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    And if you're very careful, you could even run a dual-boot / VM combination. A non-recommended feature (I know of VirtualBox VM having this, so probably the others as well) is to link to a physical HDD or Partition instead of the default VM image. That way you can have a dual-boot working through Grub, while also allowing you to use the exact same Linux installation inside a VM on Windows. Though, I'm warning you - this can very easily corrupt discs (as both Windows & Linux try to work on those discs at the same time). If you do go this route, then make sure that Windows doesn't try to mount the Linux partition while the Linux VM is running. Other way round would be a similar story.
    Way too complicated, it always try to use the KISS principle, what works for me is to install each OS on its own hard drive, but when installing UBUNTU I unplug the Windows drive so it cannot be touched, after UBUNTU sucessfully boots I plug the Windows drive back in and let GRUB then find the Windows install, set the Linux as boot drive and use GRUB to boot into either installation.

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  3. #13
    Gold Member irneb's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by chrismine View Post
    Way too complicated, it always try to use the KISS principle, what works for me is to install each OS on its own hard drive, but when installing UBUNTU I unplug the Windows drive so it cannot be touched, after UBUNTU sucessfully boots I plug the Windows drive back in and let GRUB then find the Windows install, set the Linux as boot drive and use GRUB to boot into either installation.
    Well even simpler, if you don't unplug Windows and then install Ubuntu, you need not manually setup Grub later and set the Ubuntu drive/partition as default - that would be the default setting anyway for the usual Ubuntu install. The benefit of your method though would be that the Windows Boot-Manager still resides on the same disc, and to undo the Ubuntu's Grub install would mean to simply set the Windows disc as the default bootup disc in BIOS.

    The partitioning (as I've stated) is not necessarily good/bad, it just makes performance better when used properly. It depends on your situation - how many programs run reading/writing to disc at any one time (e.g. are you running some sort of server program in the background), depending on what's going on during the usual course it might not make any difference having a 2nd disc/partition. When installing any Linux it automatically makes at least 2 partitions (the 2nd meant for its virtual RAM swap disc). Windows places its virtual RAM into a file on its system disc - some would suggest to move this file onto a separate disc of its own (again due to performance issues), also (even just a partition on the same disc) helps prevent fragmentation of swap space.
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