Hello Folks,

I have a Windows 8.1 installation that I would like to keep because I want to keep the option to play games on Windows. However, I would like to install Xubuntu for my normal non game stuff. When I boot to the live CD and try to install it, it tells me that it cannot detect any other operating systems and wants me to format/partition my drives. I have installed this before on Windows 7 and not had any problems. Has anyone else run into this? Also, has anyone used LUKS? I would like to give that a go as well.

Thanks for your time,

Tark

Look for a guide on installing on a Win 8 UEFI machine - totally different than Win 7...

So I found a you tube clip of a guy installing it. However, he is having to manually create all the partitions (swap, usr etc...). Perhaps I need to find the actual Xubuntu support. Seems like I should just be able to shrink one of my Windows partitions and then tell Xubuntu to use it and it should create everything it needs.

I would not trust the installer to do an auto or semi-auto install. You need to use the Manual/something else option. Try running fdisk or open gparted from Xubuntu to see if it recognizes partitions. Also, if you have an OEM pre-installed windows 8, it is most likely using UEFI and you will need to install Xubuntu in UEFI mode or it won't boot.

Man, I wish I would have saw this before I started. I followed a youtube tutorial on basically shrinking my data partition in Win 8 and then booting to Xubuntu and installing swap and / on that now free space. The installation completed but when I rebooted I did not get either Grub or Windows Boot Loader. I now am unable to boot to anything. Is there anyone here who could help me? I cannot believe it is this complicated. UEFI is the stupidest thing, I have done this a millon times with BIOS.

I don't have EFI on any machines so haven't used the option with an Ubuntu/Linux install. My understanding is that with the Ubuntu installation medium you will have an option for EFI install or standard MBR. Did you do an EFI install of Ubuntu? From reading a number of posts at ubuntu forums mixing them will result in what you have.

If you have another computer you can use, go to the site below and download the boot-repair and burn it as an image to a disk so it is bootable and boot it from your machine with the problems. I'd read the page and any instructions, maybe just select the option to create the bootinfo output to post here.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

1 members found this post helpful.

That is what the folks at Xubuntu support told me to use. It worked like a charm! I am back in business baby! Thanks so much for your reply, I appreciate the time you took to write it.