Hello all, I just bought a Dell xps 13" laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed. Does anyone know how to dual-boot it with Windows 10? I can only find threads performing the operation starting from Windows and would hate to cause a catastrophy due to ignorance. Many thanks in advance!

You must make some free space on the HDD to make a Win10 partition. Then, install Win10. After that Ubuntu won't boot anymore. So, you must boot with the Ubuntu install DVD, choose 'rescue', and reinstall the boot loader. Then you should have both OSs.

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That sounds pretty straight forward. I'm not sure the laptop comes with a ubuntu install dvd as it's pre-loaded. Does that mean I have to burn a disc image from the pre-installed Ubuntu version in advance or could I just download a new version?

Another possibility is to install VirtualBox under Linux, and boot W10 in a virtual machine.

Yet another option, if you know that the machine can boot from an external device, would be to buy an external hard drive. Put the disk drive of your choice as the primary drive inside the box, and the other one in the external enclosure. Select the operating system by specifying which drive to boot from.

As you might have guessed, I do not like to monkey with "dual booting" or to repartition things. But I use external hard drives (FireWire, in my case ...) rather constantly.

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You will first need to determine whether Ubuntu is installed UEFI/GPT or Legacy boot. Since you can boot Ubuntu, do that and open a terminal and run the command below which will output either EFI or Legacy.

Windows 10 will have a Custom install option which you should use otherwise you are likely to overwrite everything on the disk. Windows will overwrite your bootloader without asking or informing you if you are using Legacy. Not sure what would happen with an EFI install.

Which release of Ubuntu are you using? You can download and burn a new DVD or put the Ubuntu iso on a flash drive and boot that because you can't do it from the installed system as it will be mounted and in use.

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It looks like 16.04 is the version installed on the XPS 13 which is the current LTS version so no worries there. You can burn a DVD or USB and boot to rescue mode where you can reinstall the grub boot loader as stated.

How easy it will be to repartition the drive is dependent on how Dell installed Ubuntu. I'm with sundialsvcs and usually go with VMs over duel booting if needed.

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I would agree with using a Win 10 VM in virtualbox, as that's how I do it myself.