Windows 7: Dual Boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu

Thanks for the tutorial.
Looking forward to part two.

Regards

Added the second Option.

Thanks for the work done.
Will give this a go.

Regards

Good tutorial. Two recommendations I would make for people doing a full native installation... if you don't establish an internet connection before before beginning the install, the average first time user will not be able to get drivers for hardware that wasn't included in the cd... this includes some wireless adapters adapters and hardware that is very old, very new, or isn't commonly used

Also Ubuntu installs much more quickly from a flash drive than from a cd/dvd and the process is no more difficult than burning a CD in windows 7

if you just want to try it for a few days, I would recommend using one of the other tutorials to make a bootable flash drive, rather than using wubi..on the average system, it works better as a portable OS booted from a flash drive than when installed inside windows as a program

Thanks for the info

Regards

Whats the maximum number of partitions in Windows 7 for one drive?
I have Ubuntu as a virtual machine on vmworkstation and I have a backup of the two drive partitions using paragon drive manager 2010 this includes the swap partition. I want to create this on my current installation but I am not sure if you can create a logical partition with the two partitions within or if you have to create two seperate partitions? I already have four partitions so can I create one more partition?
Paragon drive manager allows the set up of dual boot configurations so I think that this will work but I need some advice on the current situation.

You get 3 primary partitions and a logical partition..

however, the best way I've found to dual boot ubuntu (or any other current free version of linux) with any version of windows since xp is with a clean install of both operating systems on their own primary partitions

use the windows install disk to:
Create a windows system partition of at least 40GB but no more than 20% of the HDD
Create a 2nd NTFS media partition that leaves 10-20% of the end of the HDD unformatted and unpartitioned, for sharing files between windows and linux
Delete the system reserved partition before installing windows 7

After windows is installed.. boot the linux install cd/dvd/usb key drive and install using the "use the largest contiguous free space" option.. and let linux determine the size of the SWAP partition.

any attempts to prepare the linux portion of the HDD using a windows utility or with a third party partition tool, other than just creating free unpartitioned space at the end of the drive, is doomed to fail miserably if you are someone who needs to ask how to do it

Looks like it doomed to fail so I've created a new install with the original Windows 7 now on a logical partition the same size in total as my original which had two primary partitions for the C and D drives. I use the paragon dual boot software to boot up between the two os's. I've deleted the windows 100 Mb partition and installed the paragon os bootup software and so far it boots up Winows ok.
The rest is free space so now doing a fresh install of ubuntu, but because I want to have a existing ubuntu install which I backed up as a partition which 30 Gb is it ok to specify the same size partition for the new install and then over write this with the previous backup partition? If I create a swap partition of the same size as the original then will this configuration work ok?

You may want to add Part #3 in sometime as well. The "install in Windows" option is seen when first placing the live cd in the drive or when browsing to the wubi.exe on the cd you burn.

The other option for setting a dual boot with ubuntu is assigning the mount point "/" to the main root parition and then seeing a new entry added in the 7 BCD using the EasyBCD program's form of NeoGrub which also works quite well. The advantage of the wubi installer however is seeing the latest release installed while in Windows to another partition(root), another hard drive, or even a usb flash drive.

These are a few other options to mention here. Still looks good however!