Dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu, SSD + HDD

I actually did this for myself a few months ago. The process is a bit long, and read through the entire thing before you make any decisions as to whether you want to do it or not. You will need to change your registry, and although I have not experienced any problems so far, you may if you don't do everything as I did.

First, set up your partitions in a Ubuntu live disk. Copy all your information to a safe volume in case something happens. Then, wipe all your drives.

Install Windows first. When you create your account during installation, choose a spare account name. It doesn't matter what this name is, except for the fact that it cannot be the name you want to use in the future. I would call it something like "spare."

After installing Windows, create an account with your real account name, but do not log into it yet. Go into regedit, and change all instances of C:/Users to D:/Users (or whatever drive you have your storage on, be it D:, E:, F:, G:, etc. Don't change anything like C:/Users/Administrator, though, only the ones with C:/Users and the ones that would pertain to you.

After doing this load of registry edits, go and restart your computer and log into your new account. If you've done everything right, your new account's profile should be in the drive you had set it to be.

If it is, great. Delete the spare whose account is still on C:/. Do whatever you want on Windows, and after that, install Ubuntu.

I can expect that you can install Ubuntu without any instruction. During installation, I installed my user folder in the normal directory in the same partition as my main installation. I then created symlinks on my user folders by using the commands:

rm -r ./Documents
ln -s /media/Storage/Users/Tyler/Documents ./Documents
rm -r ./Downloads
ln -s /media/Storage/Users/Tyler/Downloads ./Downloads
rm -r ./Music
ln -s /media/Storage/Users/Tyler/Music ./Music
rm -r ./Pictures
ln -s /media/Storage/Users/Tyler/Pictures ./Pictures
rm -r ./Videos
ln -s /media/Storage/Users/Tyler/Videos ./Videos

Tyler is my username on Windows, and Storage is the name of my storage partition.

These commands don't include the templates and the Desktop folder, although I expect that they would be easy to implement.

These symlinks do not have the pretty images, and I have not found a permanent fix for that at this moment. I can set the icon image, but it is reset. I suspect that this is because it needs to mount every time I start up, and that resets the images. I'll post a fix if I find one.

If you want to automount your storage partition upon startup in Ubuntu, you'll need find which partition to mount. In a terminal, use

sudo fdisk -l

You should receive a list of partitions. Mine looks like this.

tyler@Tyler-PC:/$ sudo fdisk -l
[sudo] password for tyler: 

Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0xf64a0fce

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *        2048   125831167    62914560    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2       125831168   188745727    31457280   83  Linux
/dev/sda3       188745728   608364543   209809408    7  HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda4       608364544   625141759     8388608   82  Linux swap / Solaris
tyler@Tyler-PC:/$ 

Search "Startup Applications" and add the command

udisks --mount /dev/sda3

sda3 should be replaced with the one for the disk you have. I had remembered that I had set mine to sda3 when I made my partitions. Also, it is my largest.

After that command, upon startup, you shouldn't need to navigate to your storage partition via nautilus to mount it. I'd only discovered that fix yesterday; as I use Eclipse to develop in Java, needing to mount it via nautilus every time was extremely obnoxious.

Good luck!


Symbolic Links

I recently setup a new computer for dual booting Ubuntu and Windows and I came up with a solution using symbolic links. I found that symbolic links can be the best thing to setup the two operating systems if you'll be using them both regularly. This guide will walk you through setting up your system to keep all of your personal files on your larger drive and let you access them seamlessly from each OS.

Formatting

Partition the SSD as whatever sizes you want with two partitions, I would use 60GB partitions. Use the whole 1TB as NTFS so both operating systems can read it. Windows will need a NTFS partion and Ubuntu will work best with an ext4 partition on the SSD.

Install

I would install Windows first so Ubuntu can setup your boot manager for you. You don't need to do anything to Windows at this point. When installing Ubuntu next set where your large drive mounts when picking where to install to, for more info on this check out this guide. I would recomend mounting to /media/Data/ Once you have them both installed and the 1TB is formated as NTFS you can put all of your presonal files on the big drive. You can also just create empty folders but it's not as easy to visualize.

Linking

Once your files are in place you will need to link them. In both Windows and Ubuntu you will be creating a new "folder" when you link so you can't leave the old one there.

Windows

In Windows the command you'll want to use will be mklink /J LINK_LOCATION ORIGINAL_LOCATION so if you have the Windows drive as C: and the 1TB as D: with your pictures in D:\User\Pictures you would use mklink /J "C:\Users\USERNAME\Pictures" "D:\User\Pictures" after deleting the Pictures folder in your user folder.

Ubuntu

You will use ln -s ORIGINAL_LOCATION LINK_LOCATION to link in Ubuntu. Note that the directories are switched compared to Windows. So using the picture example again and assuming you mounted the 1Tb to /media/Data you would use ln -s /media/Data/User/Pictures/ /home/USERNAME/Pictures after deleting the Pictures folder in your user folder.

Done

After this you should be ready to go! Keep in mind you can link any folder you want off of the SSD. The user folders such as Music, Pictures, Documents, Videos, and even Desktop can all be moved to access from both operating systems. You may also want to move other folders like "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps" or "/home/USERNAME/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps" depending on what large programs you plan on using since the SSD has a more limited capacity.