How to have dual boot on a Dell?
 

Hi, I have got a Dell device (inspiron 11 - 3000 series), it has a windows 10 on it with 32GB of capacity for drive C.

I have got an SD card with 128GB and I want to install ubuntu on it and have dual-boot device. If I write the iso file of ubuntu on the SD, it seems that it takes the whole capacity.

How can I tun the SD card into an unallocated partition to install ubuntu on it?

Hi,

If you put the iso directly on the SD, it is going to turn the SD into iso9660 and it will look like it is a DVD.

I would suggest you write the iso to a USB instead. Then, boot from the USB, select "Try Ubuntu" and use GParted to make the partitions you need on the SD, then install.

Since you already have Windows 10, I guess the system is UEFI. There are certain things you need to be careful about :

- Just check if there is Fastboot and Secure boot ON; these might not let you boot into the USB.
- You will need to make an EFI partition on the second drive as well (i.e. you SD), then you can place ext4 partitions for Ubuntu.

Check this out for more help:
http://linuxbsdos.com/2015/10/31/how...o-hard-drives/

How did you do that? Did you use something like rufus, unetbootin or Universal USB Installer? That would be expected behavior. If you had the Grub bootloader installed on either the internal hard drive or the SSD, you could simply copy the iso to a partition on the SSD and boot it and install it to another partition on the SSD. Since you seem to only have windows currently, that won't work.

Much easier to use a DVD or usb/flash drive. Also, dual booting with windows 10 and Ubuntu is discussed at the Ubuntu documentation site below.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

I actually used the dd command on another device to write the iso file on the SD.
Anyway, I just used cfdisk and formatted the SD card and wrote the iso file on a USB flash.
However, I am encountering another difficulty.

I want to install ubuntu from the USB to my SD card. 1. should I turn the SD card partition to unallocated?
2. what format should I chose for the SD card to install ubuntu?

I have 3 Dell laptops I dual-boot with Fedora. Here's the process I followed
* Create a bootable live fedora usb stick using fedora media writer. This writes a hybrid boot to the usb stick
* Use windows disk management to shrink the windows partition, leaving unallocated space for fedora
* Boot the live usb in UEFI/Secure boot mode
* Run the Fedora "install to hard disk" and install Fedora in the unallocated space

This has always worked for me, ending up with a UEFI/Secure Boot dual boot machine.

You will have an option to format and select the filesystem type for the install. I would recommend you read the link I posted earlier on dual booting windows/Ubuntu if you are using UEFI.

if there's no data on the sdcard, there's no harm in doing that.
you need 2 partitions at the very least - the root partition denoted by a single '/', and swap.
root partition, i'd go with ext4.