How do I partition my LENOVO LEGION Y720 to dual boot with Ubuntu

Question

How should I format this drive to optimally use Ubuntu 16.04 with Windows.

I will be using both of them for different purposes (Ubuntu for work and most other things, Windows for gaming and a few other things).

The default Disk Management Partitioning is as follows with USB inserted.

Answer 1

I had a hard time dual booting Lenovo Legion Y720. Especially, configuring both GUI enviroment and CUDA environment was very tough.

Here are the steps on how to do it:

1. Open Disk Management in Windows. Make free space in HDD. I recommend giving half of the disk space. (Disk Management)
2. Enable secure boot and disable fast boot in the UEFI. Press Fn + F2 during booting.
   Normally, you disable secure boot, however, Samsumg SSHD is unable to recognize the firmware unless using secure boot. This means if you don't enable secure boot, you can't install Ubuntu on your PC.
3. Open Settings -> Update & Security -> Recovery -> Advanced startup. (Advanced Setup )
4. Click USB Device. (USB Boot)
5. Don't use GUI Live CD. Because nouveau open source NVIDIA graphics driver have bug in GTX1060 support. Write nomodeset in the livecd cmdline script by pressing live cd grub screen by pressing e. If you couldn't succeed by using the normal Live CD, use Ubuntu Server. I did configuration with Ubuntu server.
6. Lenovo Legion Y720 uses UEFI, so use a partition that support UEFI. Click UEFI support in the installer.(e.g. gparted, ....)
7. Do Manual setup of ubuntu partition. (How to use manual partitioning during installation?)

8. If you are using ubuntu server but not configured GUI environment, install one desktop package with any of these commands, I prefer xubuntu-desktop

   apt install ubuntu-desktop
   # or
   apt install xubuntu-desktop
   

9. If you want to use your GPU in the X server, install nvidia-375 driver.

   apt install nvidia-375 nvida-prime nvidia-xconfig
   

10. If you want to use CUDA, install CUDA from the run file which the NVIDIA web provides. Don't use package install because the package installer updates the driver to new version and GTX1060 doesn't support CUDA in the new driver version.(use nvidia-375 to support CUDA)