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I'm brand new to ubuntu, but I've done a lot of research and I'm currently in the middle of installing ubuntu on my laptop. I looked everywhere for an answer to this question, but every answer out there has a setup slightly different to mine so I could not figure it out.

I have 2 hard drives in my laptop, one 250gb ssd (C:) and a 1tb hdd (D: used only for storage). I have windows 8.1 currently installed on the ssd (Im trying to setup a dual boot with windows and ubuntu both on the ssd). The efi partition is also on the ssd. I manually created 3 ubuntu partitions all on the ssd (root, swap, and home).

My question is, where do i install the boot loader? I do not want ubuntu and windows to boot separately, so i was thinking the bootloader should go onto my ssd. The installer defaulted to dev/sda which it says is my 1tb hdd, but I can change it to dev/sdb which it says is my ssd. I'm not exactly sure where windows is booting from, but putting the bootloader on my hdd doesn't really make sense to me. So should I put the bootloader on dev/sda or deb/sdb?

Btw, my laptop is uefi. Thank you.

roxasxemnas
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2 Answers2

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Nevermind, I got it to work. I chose dev/sdb as the bootloader install location and everything worked perfectly. Upon reboot, the grub menu appeared and I can boot windows or ubuntu with no problems.

roxasxemnas
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Assuming your Windows EFI/bootloader is on sdb, adding Ubuntu's bootloader (shimnx64.efi/grubx64.efi) should just put them into the directory /EFI/ubuntu when you specify the EFI partition as the bootloader target. Just specifying the device (e.g. sdb) has never worked for me (always just goes to the sda's EFI) But, sometimes even specifying the partition (sdb1 or whatever) will not work either.

Definitely back up the existing EFI partitions's directories and files (they are just files, so copy them somewhere), and expect to have to copy the shim/grubx64 into /EFI/ubuntu yourself. While you are at it, another copy of the bootloaders put into /EFI/Boot may ease problems -- name the bootloader you use (shimx64.efi for secure boot, grubx64.efi otherwise) to bootx64.efi, and if that's shim you renamed, then copy over grubx64.efi too. boot-repair does this, but it also does many other things, which probably not necessary.

ubfan1
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