Alright, guys. I have had many requests for this, so in this video, I'm going to show you how to dual boot your computer. Although I am going to try to make at as easy to follow a process as possible, please do not attempt this unless you know exactly what you are doing because you could really screw up your computer.
The purpose of dual booting is to put more than one operating system on a single computer, so for instance, if you like Windows and you like Linux, but you do not have two separate computers to put them on and you do not want to mess with the limitations of Virtual PC's, then you could dual boot both of the operating systems and be able to put both of them on a computer and run them independently without that many conflicts.
So there is a lot to go over in this video. Let us go ahead and get started. If you are running a Windows environment and you want to install Ubuntu Linux as a dual boot, there is an easy way to do that if you go to wubi-installer.org.
Wubi is an application that installs Ubuntu as a program within Windows so that you can add and remove it just like any other program. So once you run the setup for that, you can choose the installation size, the desktop environment, and then put in a password and click "install" and it is going to download the image, create a partition for it, and set up dual booting on your computer. So when you click "Finish" to reboot your computer, you will see a screen like this whenever it boots back up so you can choose either Windows to boot to, or Ubuntu, so I just chose Ubuntu and it is going to finish the Ubuntu installation setup. And it is going to boot to as it if it were installed alone on this computer.
And the good thing about using it through Wubi is that if you decide in the future you want to get rid of Ubuntu and get everything back to normal, just go into Windows and go to Add/Remove programs, choose Ubuntu and you can uninstall it and it will get rid of everything for you.
So the next thing that you want to download is a program called "Iso Recorder". This step is for if you just want to partition your hard drive off. "ISO Recorder" is a free application that allows you to burn ISO files to a CD rather easily. If you don't have Windows I think this is Windows only, you can use any other type of burning software like NERO or something like that, so just run the setup application and install ISO Recorder and whenever you are through, close out of all the folders and go back to Google and do a search for GParted.
Now GParted is a Linux distribution that handles partitions, editing them and formatting them and creating them. You just want to download the ISO image for the Live CD of GParted to your computer. And since you have ISO recorder installed, just put in a blank CD, right click on GParted, and select "Copy To Image", and it is going to bring up a dialog box that allows you to burn it to a blank CD. ‘
Whenever it is through burning to the CD, just click "Finish" and reboot your computer. You will notice on the splash screen of your computer, it tells you a button to press to enter setup, mine was DELETE but yours may be different. What you want to do is get into setup, and find where it lists the order of the boot devices, and make sure you have CDROM listed first and Hard Disk second. Your setup may not look like mine, so just mess around with it until you find those options, and then save the changes and reboot your computer.
And now, whenever it reboots, it should boot to the GParted CD that is in your CD drive. And I’m just going to go with the default settings for this. If yours does not work, you may want to change up the settings, but this gives you the options for the keyboard layout, and then the language you prefer, and then if you want to start up GParted automatically.
And this is what GParted looks like. It goes through and tells you the different partitions on your computer, and if you want to resize one, just select the partition you want to resize and drag the slider bar over until you get to the size of Gigabytes that you want for the new partition and then click "resize", and then select that new partition that you just created and click "New" at the top, the "New" button, and you can choose how you want to format it. Whether it be NTFS or FAT32. Then just click "Apply" and sit back and wait because it will take a couple of hours for this to finish.
But whenever it is through, exit out of it and reboot your computer and you want to take out the GParted CD and put in the CD of the Operating System that you want to install, but the main thing that you want to watch for is whenever it asks you what partition to put it on, be sure to select the partition you created, the second partition, because if not, it is going to install it on your main partition and wipe out everything that is on your computer and you don't want to do that.
Now, If you get a little carried away with installing stuff on your computer, you might screw up your boot menu and how your system boots. Now in case that happens, there is a pretty cool program that I have found to organize all of that, and it is called GAG. So if you open up a web browser, and do a Google search for "gag boot menu", the first result is going to take you to the GAG Graphical Boot Manager that you can download. And this just organizes everything to make your boot up process a little bit simpler. Just download it and extract all the files form the zip archive, and you will find an ISO CD somewhere in there. It is called CDROM.ISO.
And using ISO Recorder, you can burn it to a blank CD and whenever you reboot you computer, it is going to boot up and you want to hit "4" to install, choose your keyboard layout, and then choose your language, and then you want to hit "S" to enter setup and then hit "H" to save it to the hard drive and then hit "A" to add a new Operating System. I am going to choose "B" and this is my Windows XP partition, so I am going to type that in. And you can even put a password in, if you want, and then change the icon for it. So now I am going to hit "A" again and choose "C" this time, and this is my Windows Vista partition. So I am going to put that in and I am not going to put a password and then hit "C" for the icon.
Now hit "H" again to save everything to your hard drive, and whenever you boot your computer back up, you are going to see a menu that looks like this and you can choose what you want to boot to.
And if you ever wanted to uninstall it, just boot back up to the GAG CD and choose "5" to uninstall it and whenever you reboot your computer, it should be back to the way it was before you installed the program.
So that is a good way to organize your boot process and a good way to clear it up if you end up not liking it. So, again, be careful with this if you do it, because you could seriously screw stuff up on your computer. And if you’ve got more tips, feel free to leave those below, or check out the new tinkernut.com forum. Just go to tinkernut.com/forum and leave any tips you may have there. Alright, that is it for this tutorial, for more go to Tinkernut.com.
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