Even More on Ubuntu 14.04

I wrote yesterday about installing Ubuntu 14.04 as a dual-boot option on my Windows 7 laptop. I also posted a copy of this blog on Linked-In. An ex-colleague of mine read the Linked-In post and commented that he tried it on his system last week, but it did not work. I advised him to check things like available disk-space, RAM, and so on and also commented that he could try the "live" CD which is available as an option when one begins the Ubuntu installation.

On reflection, I realized that I had been using another flavor of Linux in 2009 or 2010 (Mandriva, which is RPM based,) but not Ubuntu, which is Debian based. Also, I had not completely written about the process for creating a dual-boot machine, (as this was not the point of my post). Thus I thought I'd outline those three initial steps as well for good measure. Here goes...

First of all, you should have a reasonable amount of spare disk-space to play around with. Also, your main operating system (in my case Windows 7) should not be endangered or compromised in any way, so care should be taken while rearranging/partitioning your hard drives. In my case, I had Windows 7 installed on drive C: plus a second partition -- drive D: -- to store data, files, etc. I planned to use drive D: as the "common-denominator" between Windows and Ubuntu, to share files if necessary. Windows 7's drive had about 130 GB only in total (didn't I mention this was a "test" laptop?) and drive D: was only using about 15 GB. Thus I couldn't spare too much space for Ubuntu. Also, my system had just about 4 GB of RAM to play around with. Hence I was forced to allocate just 15 GB to Ubuntu.

I opened up my Windows' Disk Management Utility (Right-Click on Computer, chose "Manage") and then selected C: I then chose to "Shrink" the drive, leaving about 15 GB of "Unallocated Space."

This is quite important ... don't play around with Disk Management Utility unless you are confident that you know what you're doing. Else your system may be rendered inoperable and, unless you have a recovery tool, you're in for some headaches later on.

I left the 15 GB "Unallocated Space" as-is, for I planned to point Ubuntu here, upon installation. (As it turned out, I didn't need to do anything because Ubuntu is now intelligent enough to apparently look for this space and install itself here, without compromising any existing drives or data. Cool!)

I next logged out of Windows, inserted the Ubuntu boot USB (which I had earlier created from the downloaded ISO image), chose the option to boot from this and, as I wrote yesterday, everything went swimmingly.

Hope this helps my ex-colleague, if he's reading this (I plan to copy this to Linked-In as well, just in case) and anyone else who may have a similar experience.