dual booting in Ubuntu?

[idiotprogrammer]

Hi, I have a question.

I want to have a dual boot environment. Here's my plan.

1. Buy laptop. Burn Recovery CDs for Vista 64.
(test T400 on LiveCD for Ubuntu).
2. Use gparted to reduce Windows partition.
3. Install Ubuntu on other partition, with dual boot.
4. When Windows 7 comes out, upgrade over my windows partition.

is there anything I haven't thought of?

for example:

Can I make recovery CD for Windows 7?

[Harryc]

If the W7 is an upgrade disc from Lenovo I'd assume it would create a recovery partition and that you'd be able to create recovery CD's from it. That is all conjecture at this point because nobody will have the CD's until October/November 2009. Otherwise your plan looks OK. When you install W7 it will over-write the MBR/GRUB so you'd have to reinstall GRUB to get to Ubuntu again on the dual boot. The catch 22 there is that installing GRUB would also clobber access to Rescue & Recovery for W7 via the keyboard Thinkvantage button. . There is a way to install GRUB on the Ubuntu boot partition, but that is another thread.

[BitNetMonkey]

Have you thought about WUBI?

http://wubi.sourceforge.net/

[idiotprogrammer]

Wow, WUBI sounds awesome! I'll check that out. That may be my solution.

rj

[yak]

Yes, WUBI is cool. One disadvantage I noticed is that one cannot boot into Ubuntu after hibernating the Windows (the boot menu is skipped when waking up in that case) which I did sometimes when using a real separate Ubuntu partition and GRUB.

[mikek5117]

EasyBCD is a popular boot manager in the Linux community. EasyBCD will let you dual/multi boot various combinations of Win and Linux and you can use either the Windows or Linux boot loader regardless of the order you installed the OPS to the drive(s). I am currently running XP, Win7 and Ubuntu on my T60p (installed in that order) and am using the Win7 boot loader which is in the drives MBR (restored by EasyBCD after I finished my Ubuntu install. I did end up using NeoGrub which is included with EasyBCD to boot into Ubuntu, only because I had already installed Grub to the MBR and for some reason it didn't want to work when I tried to setup it onto the Ubuntu partition.

If you are using Ubuntu 9.04 then you should download the 2.0 beta version of EasyBCD but it seems fine. The directions on the website are ok but if you read though the external links at the end of the Linux install section it will give you a lot of extra help.