Dual boot

dickrounds · 08-04-2007, 11:37 AM

I recently installed Ubuntu on a Dell laptop. Works great, however, my wife wants to play online bridge and we discovered that the software will only work with Windows.

Is there any way to convert this laptop to a dual boot system at this point or do I have to start all over again by installing Windows first?

Dick

XavierP · 08-04-2007, 06:04 PM

dickrounds - because your question is very different to the thread you posted in, I have split it off to it's own thread in Linux-General.

m4mach · 08-04-2007, 06:16 PM

I think this is possible, but I never tried. All you need to know before installing Windows is that Windows needs one primary and active (bootable) partition to exist on. I think there is an option to change target disk and partition in installer, so it should be useful.

After installation one should tell Grub (If you have Grub) how to boot Windows: default entry looks like this:

Code:

title Windows
root (hd0,0)
chainloader	+1

camh · 08-05-2007, 01:00 AM

You should be able to use gparted to resize your linux partition. After that you can install windows. One thing to note though, is that you will need to reconfigure and re-install grub after windows is installed. You will have to boot from the ubuntu cd in order to do this and there is lots of howto's on the web that explain the process.