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My current setup:

Windows 7

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

My partition setup is this. (I used EasyBCD to resolve Grub) I followed this tutorial. It works flawlessly but i seldom use win7, so i plan to install win7 in virtualbox, and just delete win7 and install another distro.

  • sda1 - (Probably system reserved for windows???)
  • sda2 - Drive C
  • sda3 - Drive D (NTFS), shared by both Win7 and Ubuntu
  • sda5 - /boot (This is where i installed ubuntu)
  • sda6 - /
  • sda7 - swap
  • sda8 - /home

My questions are:

  • Since i installed Grub in /boot and use EasyBCD to fix Grub so that it appears during boot time,Is it okay to just delete the windows 7 partitions? Both Drive C and Drive D. Wouldn't i have a problem with booting since i think win7 takes control of the MBR???
  • What's the best linx distro to work alongside ubuntu 12.04 with shared /home partition.

Thanks in advance.

chanHXC
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  • You can do whatever you want with sda123. It won't matter since you are dumping windows. I would recommend choosing a linux distribution that uses GRUB for a boot manager to avoid issues. I've successfully dual booted other versions of Ubuntu as well as a Pinguy distribution. The new installation will install GRUB which will find your Ubuntu 12.04 installation and add it to the boot menu along with your new distribution. "best" is an opinion so I won't touch that. – Elder Geek Mar 13 '15 at 18:22

2 Answers2

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  1. Can't really understand this question right. Use boot-repair to fix general GRUB problems.

  2. From my experience, wiping the windows partitions never influences the other linux OS unless you execute stuff from them or you still have some sensitive data.

    Windows will take control of the boot EFI partition, in your case I think it's sda1, when you first install it. After that you can access the boot EFI and modify it to your needs (this is what the ubuntu installer did).

    So, theoretically you can wipe sda2 and 3, but not sda1 because it will wipe the ubuntu boot data together with the rest. You can clean the old windows efi files from sda1 afterwards in ubuntu.

  3. I think you could use pretty much any distro similar to ubuntu on the same home (forked ones for example, like Mint).

Anglepoise
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  • what exactly is EFI?

    Thanks on your answer. btw.

     – chanHXC Nov 16 '13 at 10:09
  • It's a partition that stores boot loaders for operating systems. Usually small ~200mb and formatted in FAT. You mount it at '/boot/efi'. It's the so called "system reserved" in windows at the start of the disk. – Anglepoise Nov 16 '13 at 12:58
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As mentioned in the other answer, it's probably possible to share /home between two distros, but it's not recommended. This previous questions has some more information on this topic - A common /home partition for multiple Linux distributions

You can just delete the Windows partitions, grub should still work. If it doesn't, it's very easy to fix it with a live CD, see How to repair/restore/reinstall Grub2 with a Live CD for instructions on how to do this, but I do not think you will need to.

Also, a clarification. You didn't install Ubuntu on /boot, mostly you installed it on /, /boot just contains the Grub files.

I would leave sda1 alone, but Drive C and D can most likely be deleted without any problem.

Community
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theintern
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  • oh yeah, i've misread the one on the tutorial. yes the /boot partition only contains the Grub files. Would i format the /boot partition also along with / partition when reinstalling? – chanHXC Nov 16 '13 at 10:12