Installing Ubuntu at my laptop (having windows 7 already - dual boot)

Question

I want to install Ubuntu (11.04) at my laptop wich already has windows 7.
The laptop has one HDD which came with 3 partitions.One hidden for the recovery(ASUS)
the one as the partition for the OS(150GB) and the other as DATA.I've shrunk the latter
and created unallocated space of about 25GB for Ubuntu.

Now the step to follow is to boot into Ubuntu live cd that I have and after that install ubuntu.
How to properly select the unallocated space to install it(and be sure that I am selecting that and not any data)?
When I should install grub? Which grub? (2/Legacy)? And how should I do that?

Thank you for your time!

Solution

I actually did the same just yesterday on my brother's laptop (clevo machine with a 300GB HDD):

• I first installed Windows 7 on an NTFS partition with 170GB of space. I also created a second NTFS partition as a backup with 100GB of space, leaving 30GB totally unconfigured/unpartitioned for Ubuntu (170GB C:\, 100GB D:\, 30GB # future Ubuntu partition #)
• I booted up from the Ubuntu CD and when the installation proceeded to the partitioning/drive space allocation options, i was presented with the following screen:

• I just selected the first option Install Ubuntu alongside Windows 7.

When the setup completed, i just rebooted and everything was ok.
Grub installed, dual boot working just fine ;-)

---

If you want to change the default O/S when booting, you can do one of the following:

The "hard" way:

From a shell, type:
cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg | grep menuentry

You will get a list of all the entries in your grub menu.
Count them starting by zero (0), e.g.

menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-10-generic' .... <-- #0
menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.38-10-generic (recovery mode)' .... <-- #1
menuentry 'Windows 7' .... <-- #2

Then, edit /etc/default/grub and change the entry GRUB_DEFAULT=X to the number you want (like #2 above for Windows).
Save the file and do a sudo update-grub in order to update grub.cfg.
You're all set.

The "easy" way:

Install StartUpManager by typing:
sudo apt-get install startupmanager

This application provides a GUI in order to make all the changes you need.

More information can be found here

Comments

[Thomas Ward]

By the way, Grub2 is automatically installed at the end of the installation procedure. Its the minimum requirement for the bootloader.

[Pavlos G.]

I've updated my answer with information about changing the default boot entry in grub ;-)