Dual-Booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 on Lenovo B570e

My wife's recently bought a Lenovo B570e, and after installing Windows 7 on it (with some difficulty; all I had was Win7 without the Service Pack, and I kept stumbling over the UEFI HDD and the drivers not installing until I patched), my wife now wants to dual boot it with Ubuntu.

I've used Ubuntu on virtual machines, and on netbooks, but I've never dual-booted it. I'd left about 200GB raw for Ubuntu while installing Windows (though I seem to recall that one of the previous versions of Ubuntu would create its own "container" on the Windows partition). I tried installing Ubuntu using its "dual-boot" option in its installer (first time I've seen it), but when I rebooted, it booted right into Windows. I checked the partitions in the Disk Management snap-in, and it has used up 200GB in the previously unused disk for something, but I don't think it installed the GRUB.

Does anyone have any advice on how I should go about this? I've already converted the disk to MBR (it's just 500GB, I don't think going from EFI to MBR is going to effect anything... I hope) so that won't be a problem. But what do I do about installing GRUB, and will the hotkeys work (for disabling and enabling bluetooth, WiFi and so on)?

 

When your machine reboots after the initial POST screen hold down shift so the GRUB menu shows - personally I would use Crunchbang (fast) or Antix (faster) instead of Ubuntu. If you need user friendly look at Linux Mint.

To install Ubuntu inside Windows use Wubi

 

I would just probably boot the ubuntu live cd again, run gparted, reformat the 200gb partition to ext4 and try reinstalling ubuntu. choose advanced install to make sure its installing where you want. Hopefully grub will install correctly this time. It's possible it could be a UEFI problem, you might want to google it.

I love antiX, but i would not be wasting my time running it on a Core i3 with 4gb of ram. Run a modern distro! but yeah, mint > ubuntu.

 

To reinstall Grub2 boot off of the Live CD:

(assuming you have a single Linux partition & have not created a separate /boot)

Code:

sudo /mnt/dev/sdax /mnt
chroot /mnt
sudo grub-install /dev/sda

(changing "x" in "sdax" to the number of your linux partition - most probably 2 or 3 - you can check in a terminal with "fdisk -l" & then run the above commands)

 

Just to throw my two cents in, I use Arch Linux and I just installed Windows 7 on my machine as well (Lenovo E430). I have it set up so that the Windows paritition(s) use the UEFI on my main HDD and my Arch linux boots off my mSATA SSD in BIOS (MBR) mode. Though I use the GPT in both instances. I would like to use UEFI for Linux, but only if I can get the kernel stub loader to work, which I have not yet been able to do. The stub loader is a feature built into the kernel that allows booting w/o a bootloader.

If you set it up this way, and it should work on a single drive, Windows then uses the EFI system partition to boot while syslinux (in your case GRUB) uses the first 512 bytes of the hard drive, or the master boot record. So it should be able to hande both without one disturbing the other.

Keep in mind that you can also set GRUB to boot off of UEFI as well, I just didn't do this because I figured there was no point in replacing a crappy complicated bootloader with another crappy complicated bootloader.

 

do you have a good link on how to set something like this up?

 

GUID Partition Table