I am new and want to do a dual boot of windows 10 and Ubuntu. How I should manage my built in 120 gb SSD?

Question

I am using Toshiba Z10t laptop+tablet . It is i 5 having 4 gb of RAM and 120 gb of built in SSD. So , I am very confused how to dual boot windows 10 and Ubuntu . Currently it is pre-installed windows 8. And also want to know how i should manage my partitions . It will be required two partitions (like one for Windows 10 and other one for Ubuntu) or it can be managed both in one partition . Actually i have no idea how to do it so need step by step guide . Love Community

Answer 1

You're asking for a step by step guide and there is one here already: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation

There's also a couple of nice guides with pictures specifically for dual-booting:

https://www.itzgeek.com/how-tos/linux/ubuntu-how-tos/how-to-install-ubuntu-18-04-alongside-with-windows-10-or-8-in-dual-boot.html

https://www.linuxtechi.com/dual-boot-ubuntu-18-04-lts-with-windows-10/

The minimum requirements in the official documentation say 25GiB of hard drive space is needed. In my experience, a fresh install takes up about half of that, but you want to have a little bit of room to install other programs and store your own files etc.

You would be better to do a bit of reading and understand a little about what you're doing first, but basically Windows will have it's own partition and Ubuntu will have it's own partition. One hard disk drive with separate sections for each operating system.

The easiest way to go about it is to use Windows to shrink the 'windows' partition in order to make space on the Hard Drive (SSD) for Ubuntu to have it's own partition.

In the 'Control Panel' program there is a section to manage hard drive partitions. Use that to shrink your 'Windows' partition as much as it will let you.

Try Ubuntu first using a Live USB. This will ensure that it's going to work fine on your hardware - you say you've got a sort of tablet/laptop, so you want to be sure that the touchscreen, wifi, sound etc are all fine before you try installing it.

I'd recommend using the program called Rufus to create your Live USB on Windows.

If you can free up about 30GiB of space on your SSD, then choosing the 'Install Ubuntu alongside Windows' option will let the installer deal with it without you having to worry about it.

Answer 2

1st of all you need to ensure your disk has mbr format (most of preinstaled laptops disk are gpt to be able to manage more than 4 partitions).

Once you've ensured that your laptop has te correct format you havae to create a new partition for Ubuntu. I recomend you to install both sistems in the same disk so you have to create a new partition in your SSD.

After that, just install Ubuntu as allways (If you wanna install W10 instead of W8, install Windows allways 1st) PAY ATTENTION when it asks you to install Linux Grub, it's 100% necesary yo let you boot both systems. Once you have your dual system, you can use Grub Customizer in Ubuntu to edit your grub as you want.