dual booting Ubuntu 13.04 and Windows 7

[Gerhard Magnus]

On 05/28/2013 05:22 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 28 May 2013 06:11, Basil Chupin <blchupin at iinet.net.au> wrote:
>> As the OP states above:
>>
>>
>> "I bought a new box with the Intel DB75EN motherboard that uses the
>> UEFI standard and DPT partitioning for the hard drives.
>
>
> Yeah, that is the problem. There is no such thing as DPT that I know of.
>
> --
Sorry for the typo -- it's GPT, not DPT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table

When it comes to booting, things aren't quite as simple as they used to be.

My original post on this matter probably included too much fdisk and 
gparted data and was ignored -- so I simplified the story slightly 
before posting again. Another mistake, as a detail I left out turned out 
to be important.

The computer has TWO hard drives: the primary (1TB) and a solid state 
secondary (180GB). I had the primary partitioned as 250GB and 750GB at 
the shop and Windows 7 installed on the 250GB partition. My plan for 
dual booting with Ubuntu 13.04 was to put "/" on the much faster 
secondary drive and "/home" on the 250GB partition of the primary. This 
made it necessary to use the "Something else" option on the installation 
menu. I put the boot loader on /dev/sda (the old procedure for dual 
booting.)

If I'd used either of the other two options -- "erase disk and install 
Ubuntu" or "install Ubuntu alongside Windows" I think my initial attempt 
at installing would have worked. I was finally successful after
this:

(1) Use a Live CD to install boot-repair and repair the MBR on the primary
(2) Install Xubuntu 12.04 (LTS) on the primary using the "erase disk and 
install" option (which, as I mentioned, can handle the new GPT MBR 
configuration in a way that is "transparent to the user")
(3) Use the Live CD and gparted to shrink the Xubuntu partition on the 
primary down to 20GB and partition the remainder as ext4
(4) Install Ubuntu 13.04 with "/" on the secondary drive, "/home" on the 
980GB partition of the primary, and the bootloader on the secondary 
(/dev/sdb).

So I have Ubuntu 13.04 up and running (it's extremely fast) and an 
Xubuntu to experiment with.

Maybe I can get Windows 7 to work if I install it on another hard drive 
and make sure the installation doesn't go anywhere near the primary 
drive that has Ubuntu on it! Or I may try one of Liam's suggestions as I 
really don't like Microsoft.