Manually Setup a Dual Boot with Ubuntu & Windows 7

This video is a response to some questions I have recently received concerning setting up a dual boot system.  I have covered this topic in two other videos/blog posts.  However, both of those videos approached this goal by two different methods as does this video.  Previously we setup our dual boot with 'Wubi' and by using the 'Side-by-Side Install' method.  But what happens if you are using an older Ubuntu Live CD or a different Linux Distro entirely?  Those options may not necessarily work for you.  In this case you'll need to manually setup the partitions and let Ubuntu install to a new, empty partition.  So how do we do this?

There are a few things you need to do first.  And these are good things to do even when setting up your dual boot via the ways we have already covered.
#1- Defrag your computer.
Why? Easy! When you use your computer on a daily basis files and data become fragmented.  This simply means that the data is becoming somewhat scattered across the free space of your hard drive.  This adversly effects your hard drive in that it may slow down read/write times of your drive in relation to your computing tasks and it can take up excess hard drive space.

By running a defrag on your hard drive, a lot of this fragmentation will be cleaned up.  So in short, even if you have no plans to dual boot; running a defrag every once in a while is still a good idea.

#2- You'll more than likely want to have Windows installed first. The installation of GRUB tends to play along better if it can see Windows first.

#3- If your Windows install isn't a freshly installed version, you will want to backup any important data on your Windows machine.  Just in case things go south or you accidentally format the wrong partition, etc.  Believe me, things like this can happen if you're not cautious during these installs.

If you're good to go with the precautions mentioned above, then follow along with the video:





Manually Setup an Ubuntu-Windows 7 Dual Boot

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