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So I've been trying to dual boot Ubuntu alongside Windows 7 on my Acer laptop. I've got Ubuntu on a flash drive and all seems well, but I can't seem to get gnub to work, leading me to think that I've been installing it in the wrong place.

At first I used the default "Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7" option, but when I rebooted my computer it just went straight to Windows as usual. I then attempted to use the "Something else" option, allocating about 50 GB for Ubuntu and 8 GB swap (I shrunk my C drive in Windows beforehand).

So the device for boot loader installation is set to /dev/sda by default, which seems to be both of my hard drives together, since it says it's 1TB and I have two 500 GB hard drives installed on my computer. I did some research, and people said to choose the device, and not a partition thereof, so the one that doesn't have a number at the end (e.g. Dev/sda1). I tried choosing this, but had the same result as before.

Should I install the bootloader on a partition then? My last idea is to set it to the partition that says "Windows 7 (loader)", but I'm afraid I'll wreck my computer, and I don't have a Windows installation disk or anything like that to help.

If you've read all this, I greatly appreciate your time and even more so any help you could give me!

Armandt Fourie
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    You problem is not with the location of where you install Grub, it needs to be installed on the first hard drive, sda. The problem is with EFI you have to select which OS to boot in the EFI (bios) screen. See first answer here - https://askubuntu.com/questions/221835/installing-ubuntu-alongside-a-pre-installed-windows-with-uefi there is a "TROUBLESHOOTING

    YOUR COMPUTER BOOTS DIRECTLY TO WINDOWS" section

     – Panther Sep 25 '17 at 14:56
  • You mention two identical drives. Is it configured for RAID? Desktop version of grub often has not installed to RAID configurations. Most Windows 7 systems are BIOS/MBR, but a few were UEFI. With both BIOS & UEFI you always specify a drive like sda not a partition like sda1. Only exception may be if you have other systems using grub and want the other system left as grub booting system. Post the link to the Create BootInfo summary report. Is part of Boot-Repair: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Info – oldfred Sep 25 '17 at 15:05
  • To be quite honest, I don't know whether they're in RAID configuration (my guess is that they're not though since this is how the computer came out of the box). I've tried fiddling with the boot order in response to the first comment and learned that my laptop can use either UEFI or "Legacy" mode. Beyond this, I haven't made any progress. – Armandt Fourie Sep 27 '17 at 17:48

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