Installing UNIX based OS in Dual Boot with Windows

Installing UNIX based OS in Dual Boot with Windows

Making a dual booting device with a UNIX based OS and Windows pre-installed is a necessity for almost all Computer Science Engineering students. But the task becomes so daunting sometimes, due to lack of correct info that many end up using it on virtual machines or worse, over telnet services.
Here is a quick guide to installing UNIX based OS with windows OS. We will consider Ubuntu and Windows 7 as examples here. Steps are similar for other variations.

Installing Windows OS 

The Windows OS family is unique in the aspect that its boot-loader cannot detect the Linux based OSes. On the other hand, we have the grub loader packaged with almost every Linux based installation which can detect the installed Windows OS. Thus we need to install the Windows OS first. So go ahead and partition your hard drive and install Windows in any one of them. But make sure that the other partition(s) are no smaller than 10 GB; atleast not the one that you intend to install Linux in.

Obtaining UNIX Installation Images

It’s the blessing of the open source community that all UNIX installations come free of cost (Exceptions exist). In our case we will be using Ubuntu version 14.04.1. This can be easily found by doing a Google search.

If you intend to install some other Linux distribution, just do a search with the “name” and “installation ISO image” as the search keywords. Here are some links to other popular Linux based distrOS.

Debian

 Fedora
 Kali Linux
 Linux Mint

 Mandriva

 OpenSuse

 Puppy Linux

 Red Hat / CentOS 

Making a bootable medium (Pen Drive/ Flash Drive / Optical Disk)

 There are many tools out there on the internet to make bootable mediums but the one that we preferred was LinuxLive USB Creator( also known as LiLi USB Creator), simply because it supports a large range of Linux distributions.

 Next you could either pop in a blank CD / DVD depending on the size of your installation or just use a USB Pen Drive. Select the correct drive letter for the medium that you want to make bootable and then select the source ISO image that you downloaded.

In the persistence section, allow some hundred MB of space for the OS to be able to work both in Live and installable mode. Check the Format the key in FAT32(this will erase your data !!) and uncheck other options. Now click on create.
It must take a couple of minutes, but the time taken may vary depending on your machine capability.

Making Space on HDD and Backing Up Data

Since we started with this assumption that the machine being used has Windows pre-installed, the condition could also be that you already have some of your data on all of your partitions. So the next thing to do is move the data of the selected partition(the one selected for installing Linux) into another partition. 

If this is your first time then it also recommended that you make a backup of all of your data on some external storage device.

Now deallocate or delete the emptied partition. This will make way for reallocation of this space in Linux partition tables.

Installing Linux

As is in our case, the Ubuntu Live image comes packaged with the GParted partitioning utility. With this we can either create a new ext4 journal volume or else we could straight away install Ubuntu with its installation utility.  

While making a new ext4 partition the mount point is to be specified as root (' / ') and z small space of about 300 MB is specified as swap space. This acts as a paging file for the OS on low spec systems.

 If using the installation utility, select the install with Windows option. If this option doesn't appear, select the Something else option and select the unallocated space on HDD.

Then input the location, username, password and time settings in the subsequent steps of installation and click next. The installation might take close to 20 minutes, but again, the time taken depends on the flavour of Linux chosen and the machine spec that it is being installed on.

Using the Linux Installation

Depending on the installation and the BIOS of your machine, the grub loader either would take over at the boot time or else you may have to bring up the menu by choosing boot options (F9 or F12 key). The latter case, most of the time, happens in newer machines which have OEM copies of Windows 8 pre-installed. You may also have to switch to legacy boot mode.

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