Need help setting up dual booting Linux

Hardware and technical stuff
1

My son asked me to help him set Ubuntu on his desktop. For now, we’ll leave Windows installed as the main OS because some of the games he plays may not work on Linux.

We got through most of the steps OK, but then got this error message:

ubi-partman failed with exit code 10 - ubuntu 18.04

I found some advice on this on StackOverflow:

ubi-partman failed with exit code 10 - ubuntu 18.04

But we can’t follow it, the advice is
Open gparted, right click on you desired partition to install Ubuntu > new > New Size : 200 MiB; filw system: fat32; > Add ;
But the ‘new’ option is greyed out.

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Any ideas?

2

Is he eager to use Ubuntu desktop? Or just have access to a command line? If the latter, it will be far easier for you to use WSL2. If the former and/or he just wants to play around, I recommend installing VirtualBox or similar and then installing Ubuntu as a virtual machine instead of trying to dual boot. Setting the machine up to truly dual boot is not really for the faint of heart and the chance that you delete something or bork your Windows install is significantly higher.

3

We might look into it, but he wants to try it for every day use so I’m not sure a VM is the way to go.

4

I used to have a Ubuntu install on a flash drive that I could boot from that still gave me full hard drive access and stuff.

I haven’t done dual boot in a long, long time…Personally I can’t offer much beyond that.

5

Not certain about that error but I’d shrink the partition within Windows first to create the free space before attempting the Linux install. Go to disk management and (to keep it simple) right click your C: drive and select Shrink Volume. Make at least a 25GB amount of free space for Ubuntu. It should show up as unallocated after you shrink it.

Also, if you have Secure Boot enabled, you probably want to go to your BIOS and disable Secure Boot. This could be a problem if you have Bitlocker enabled.

Then go through the Ubuntu install off the bootable USB.

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6

That makes sense to me. If the disk is already fully allocated it’s going to have problems.

7

Hmm, I think we started the process with unallocated 250GB but maybe we created a partition out of it before the installation started. Now I’m not sure. We’ll delete the partition and try again tomorrow.

8

Don’t use ubuntu 18 unless you have a specific need (it’s old from 2004). Stick to current LTS 22.04 if you need stable, or something newer like 23.x if you need fresher features.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

edit: oops

9

I think 18.04 is April of 2018, but yes… don’t use that. I tend to use 22.04 LTS for my day-to-day Linux work, though I’m exclusively on the CLI when I use it.

10

If you install Ubuntu on top of a working Windows machine, it will install grub2 bootloader, on the EFI partition, which will run the boot menu to either boot Linux or Windows, and it will pass boot control to the Windows loader. So you won’t choose boot source/drive from BIOS/UEFI anymore, you will need to learn to modify your grub boot priorities/timeouts/settings to change that stuff now.

Running a VM is a lot easier than rebooting the system to switch for me, but I have only run a Windows VM on Linux, not the reverse. If gaming is the primary, then dual boot may be the easiest way to get the full resources (GPU) under each OS.

11

Heh, no. We downloaded whatever the latest version is. This is just the only occurrence of the issue I could find.

12

Just posting to report success. We redid the process and this time it went well. I think the first failure may have been due to a low quality flash drive.

We did have an issue with Windows loading anyway, skipping the OS selection menu, and this was useful in giving us a hint as to what’s going on:

We delved into the BIOS and changed the order from between Windows and Linux and it’s all working now.

Now to buy my son a Tshirt.

13

Thankfully, that is the easiest step in the process!