Dual booting Ubuntu on UEFI without USB

I am wondering if it is possible to install Ubuntu on my Surface Pro 4 (UEFI, I have disabled secure boot) and dual boot with my pre-installed Windows 10. I don't have a USB drive or a disk and I am thinking of installing it directly from my hard drive.

Solution 1:

The description of the MS Surface Pro 4 indicates that it has a USB port. Thus, I recommend you buy a USB drive, if you don't have one, and install that way. If that's really impossible, then this procedure should work, with some caveats:

1. Repartition the disk so that it has a partition for the Ubuntu installation .iso file (as big as or bigger than that file) and create all the Ubuntu partitions you eventually want.
2. Write the Ubuntu .iso file to the partition you created for it. In Ubuntu, you'd use dd, but as you can boot nothing but Windows at this point, you'll need to use something else. Perhaps WinDD would work.
3. Download and install my rEFInd boot manager. You must also install the ISO-9660 filesystem driver that comes with it.
4. Reboot to rEFInd. It should show the Ubuntu .iso image as a boot option.
5. Select the Ubuntu .iso image. It should boot and you should be able to install normally, with one caveat: You might want or need to tweak the partition type codes of some of the partitions you created earlier.
6. After you're done, you may want to delete the Ubuntu .iso partition or employ it in some other way (like as a swap partition).

The big caveat here is step #1. IIRC, Windows' partitioning tools will let you shrink an in-use partition, but I'm not 100% positive of that. Also, I've never tested this procedure. I know that various critical pieces of it work in other contexts, but I'm not sure everything will fit together in this exact procedure. For instance, I know that rEFInd, with its ISO-9660 driver installed, can boot an Ubuntu installer .iso file when written to a partition on a USB flash drive; but I don't know that it will work correctly from the computer's main disk, particularly when that's also the Ubuntu installation target.

Solution 2:

Boot Ubuntu on Windows UEFI computer without USB or CD

• Use Windows Disk Management to create FAT32 partition 3GB or larger.

• Copy/Paste contents of ISO file to new partition.

• Reboot pressing F12 and select UEFI Ubuntu.

• Proceed to installation.