Installing Windows AFTER you installed Ubuntu

Hippo — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 16:12:55 +0000

I’m a big fan of the Linux operating system, but sometimes you really need a Windows to run software that isn’t available for Linux or where isn’t any related program.
Therefore you could try WINE (which emulates the Windows API within you Linux system), you could install a virtual windows using a virtual machine like Virtual Box (which emulates a whole PC within you Linux system) or you could install a native Windows operating system side by side to you Linux. If you need the whole performance you hardware could give you, you need to install Windows on your hard drive next to you Linux installation.
Since the Windows boot loader is very restrictive regarding to having multiple operating systems the easiest way is to first install Windows and then later install your Linux system, which brings GRUB (or something similar) as a boot loader.
I first installed Ubuntu on my PC and wanted to install Windows later, so I hard to do it the hardest way:

(There is absolutely no guarantee that this works for you, but this is how I did it. This instructions only work for fresh installations of Ubuntu 9.10 or later, because earlier version of Ubuntu use an older version of the GRUB boot loader.)

You need:

Enough space on hard drive
Windows installation CD/DVD
Linux/Ubuntu Live-CD/DVD (!!)
Some time you like to waste on a Windows installation process

Instructions:

Make sure you have enough free space on you hard disc.
If you hadn’t install GParted, do it now.
Make space for the Windows partition on you hard drive and create a new NTFS partition. The overview from GParted should somehow look similar to this (/dev/sda2 is my NTFS partition):
GParted - partitions on hard drive
Reboot you system, install Windows on the NEW partition on your hard drive (It is quite important to choose the right one, otherwise you Linux system could get lost). After the installation there is (currently) no way to boot you Linux system, since Windows has overwritten the Linux boot loader.
Insert you Ubuntu/Linux Live CD / DVD and boot a Live system.
Mount you Linux partition into you Live system. (Easiest way is: On main menu: “Places” -> “Name/size of Filesystem”
Open a console/terminal

Check if everything is correctly mounted and get the ID of you Linux partition. Enter:

mount

which should give you a line like this

/dev/sda2 on /media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=devkit)

Now run:

ls /media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444/boot

Replace 0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 with the ID given by the mount command earlier. (Tip: Use -Key to get autocompletion.)
The result should be very close to this:

config-2.6.18-3-686      initrd.img-2.6.18-3-686.bak  System.map-2.6.18-3-686
grub                     lost+found                   vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-686
initrd.img-2.6.18-3-686  memtest86+.bin

Overwrite the master boot record and replace the Windows boot loader with GRUB: (again insert the correct ID for the partition and make sure you perform this on the right hard drive!)
```
sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 /dev/sda
```
Grub automatically detects all the installed operating system. After a reboot you should be able to chose which operating system you want to boot.
Done.

Tip: If you do not see the grub menu during boot, press and hold the Shift key before the boot process starts.

Moved to GitHub

Hippo — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:27:55 +0000

I have been interested in git for a while and played around with it a few times and past.

Yesterday I finally moved my two open source haXe libraries (hxJson2 and hxGD) to GitHub. (hxGD was hosted on Google Code before.) I really like the ideas of the work flow of git and seriously thinking about moving all my private Subversion repositories into git repositories, since there are well working tools to even import history and branches.

First post

Hippo — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 15:48:42 +0000

Welcome to my blog!

After a while I decided to start a blog again and here is my first post. (I think this is the third try, so we will see how long this experiment will last.) Most of the blog entries will be about typical nerd and computer stuff like linux servers, programming, etc. I hope there will be some interesting topics for you.

TheHippo » General

Installing Windows AFTER you installed Ubuntu

Moved to GitHub

First post