If you're going to dual boot you would want to create a partition for Windows and them install Ubuntu on the unallocated space . The drivers you're talking about is the intel Sata drivers (IRST) .
How much space do you want for Windows 7 ?
Ununtu I would indtall in virtual. That is a lot more practical from many points of view.
Here is a little tutorial how to install Zorin which is an Ubuntu derivative. For Ubuntu it is the same procedure except for the VMware Tools installation which might be different.
VMware Player - Install and Setup Zorin
Running a lot better. Keeping everything as clean as possible until my term is over for school. After, I should be able to get all my documents, games, movies, music, etc. back on. Right now I have only the essential documents and programs.
Mostly all of it to run windows 7, and just enough to run ubuntu. I may do what AddRam or whs suggested because the only reason I need ubuntu is for the compiler.
I know Eclipse is a good compiler for C if you get it to work, but I never have. I may try again with eclipse and have no use for Ubuntu. The question was really for future purposes. In case I wanted to dual boot for other reasons or other OS.
However, I may also try a Virtual machine
The key is to use the latest tools. If you use Windows 7, install from SP1 CD. If you use Linux to partition your hard drive, make sure to use a recent distribution that comes with more recent partitioning tools. It used to be the case that Linux fdisk did not align partitions at 4kb boundaries, but maybe that got fixed recently (in any case, a lot of distributions now use different tools). The key is to align all partition boundaries at the start of a 4KB sector, as most operating systems often tend to write data in 4kb blocks. It would be a serious performance hit if such a write is split between two different 4kb sectors on the disk. Just for fun, I downloaded an alignment check tool to check partition alignments on a 3-year old PC that dual-boots Linux and Windows 7 (on an older pre-advance format drive), and it said they were already aligned correctly for 4KB sectors.
Last edited by Jacob7; 19 Apr 2013 at 02:01.
I'll also add that for 100MB you get a centralized and independent storage location for Bootmgr which helps immensely in multi-boot situations, and you also get access to WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment) where you can diagnose and in certain cases fix Windows via command-line without having to pop in a Windows 7 DVD. A very hard deal to refuse, if you ask me!
I agree with AddRAM.
If you want to dual boot Linux and Windows, pre-partition your HDD to avoid that hidden boot partition.
I've read a number threads here, where people have had problems dual booting Linux and Windows and a lot of the time it seems to be related to the hidden boot partition.
Anecdotally, I always pre-partition my OS HDD, thus avoiding the hidden boot partition and I haven't had any boot problems on my PC (XP, W7 and Linux Mint 14 and previously XP, W7 and Ubuntu 10).
It seems to me that gregrocker regularly has to help people fix hidden boot partition problems.
Note:
I'm not saying that all multi-boot problems are related to the hidden boot partition.
I thought I read that the contents of that partition were merged into the W7 partition, if you prevented the hidden boot partition from being created.
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