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I'm planning on dual booting my pc with the following setup: two nvme SSDs containing the two OS and a 1Tb HDD that is shared by the two systems for data such as Downloads, Documents, Images and all that. The HDD has two partitions one for Linux and one for Windows.

I have never put my hands on the custom install tool of the installer so I'm kinda worried to mess something up/forget something.

Can someone point me out the things to do as far as partitioning goes? Thanks in advance!

Ps: also, if I remember correctly grub will set itself up even if the two OS are on separate drives?

Bilesh Ganguly
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Bruh
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1 Answers1

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https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-install-ubuntu-desktop#0 shows you the installation process, step by step.

Step 6 shows installation drive selection choices, and if you already have Windows installed on the destination drive, it will show another option to put Ubuntu on the drive alongside Windows, what's called a 'dual boot' installation, by reducing the size of the drive allocated to Windows and giving some of it to Ubuntu (30GB should suffice). That's called partitioning.

Instead, I would suggest when you get to Step 6, choose Something Else, as oldfred suggested in his comment to your question above. Put /home on that second NVMe SSD you mentioned.

Ubuntu is much better at reading and writing Windows drive partitions than Windows is at reading and writing Ubuntu drive partitions (generally an ext4 partition), so if you keep you data on the Windows side (an NTFS partition) and access it from Ubuntu, you will have less trouble.

In Windows, create a new directory in the root of the NTFS HDD named Content. Move your Movies and Music folders to folders under Content, following this process. You would also reassign the location of Quick Access items Music and Video to the new drive in Explorer] When Explorer asks to move existing files, tell it yes.

After completing the install of Ubuntu, make sure NTFS partition is mounted at startup (i.e. in /etc/fstab). Then follow the steps at https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=838937 to soft link to the Content folder in the NTFS partition on the HDD with

ln -s source destination
K7AAY
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