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General discussion

Dual booting

May 18, 2010 2:38AM PDT

I would like to dual boot my new custom built windows 7 desktop with ubuntu, but I would like it to automatically boot in windows 7 unless a certain key combination is pressed at start up, since I will use windows 7 a lot more. I would like to put ubuntu on a partition of my 500gb internal NTFS hard drive and have it dual booting, but I don't know how I would do this. Can someone please explain how to partition an NTFS hard drive, and how to dual boot it with windows 7 but boot into windows 7 without any delay unless a certain key(s) are pressed. (and I'm assuming I can install ubuntu onto my secondary partition without having to reinstall windows 7 or anything, I have the official ubuntu 9.10 installation disk).

Discussion is locked

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You can't
May 18, 2010 3:23AM PDT

You can't... At least not the key combo thing. However, you can set it up so that after X number of seconds, it will default to Windows. That's really the best you can do. If you had a Mac, then we could talk, but doing this on a PC is not going to happen.

But I would suggest reading the documentation on the Ubuntu disc or online. It should explain in great detail the general process, and saves us from duplicating that effort.

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oh ok
May 18, 2010 3:30AM PDT

Yeah ive seen it done on a mac dual booting with windows booting up unless you press both alts, and was wondering if you could do similar. Is there anyway to make it wait like 3 seconds then unless you press a key? And how would I actually set up the dual booting and partitioning?

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No.
May 18, 2010 5:52AM PDT

What you asked for has not been seen today. Maybe someone could code it up but today you have your usual boot managers but none I've used or seen do what you asked for. Why isn't what we have now usable until you can talk a programmer into crafting your new boot manager?
Bob