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I have UBUNTU 14.04 installed.

What will happen if I install Windows 8.1 on a different partition?

Is there any difference between installing WIN8.1 on a computer that has UBUNTU already installed and installing UBUNTU on a machine that has WIN8.1 already installed?

doton doton
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    Welcome to askubuntu.com! Generally it is better having Windows installed first, and Ubuntu second, mainly because Windows doens't like being a non-main partition. I suggest you read more information here and here – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Nov 05 '14 at 09:02

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Yes, definitely.

Rule of thumb: first Windows, then Linux.

Windows installers take (almost) no care of existing operating systems on your machine. If you installed Ubuntu first and then ran the Windows 8.1 installer, its routines would just overwrite any boot manager (The one where you choose which OS to boot). Then you can choose to use Win8 on startup, but probably not Ubuntu. This is very difficult to fix, so don't try to do it that way!

Ubuntu on the other hand is very well aware of the fact that it is often just installed as a secondary OS, which is why it will even offer you to install it alongside windows during installation. This will setup your boot manager (grub in this case) to include any existing OSes even if you choose to do some manual partitioning. Usually this breaks the windows starter, but fixing that is easy: get the installation medium, boot it up, hit "repair" and you have a working dualboot environment.

ApolloLV
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