Since this article is about dual booting Windows with Ubuntu, I assume you already have either Windows 10 or 11 installed in your PC.
Requirements:
USB drive - 8GB minimum
Ubuntu OS Iso image. -You can also use your preferred OS such as Linux Mint but the examples given will be on Ubuntu.
Step 1: Partition your drive to create space for installing Ubuntu.
To do this, use the "Create and format hard disk partitions" application. You might have to first shrink your current volume to create some free space. If you experience trouble creating a partition please see how to create disk partitions in windows 10.
In our case we are going to use Ventoy to create a bootable USB drive. Another popular alternative is Rufus. If you already know how to use it you can go ahead and skip step 2 and create a bootable USB drive with Rufus instead.
Step 2: Create a bootable USB drive.
Download Ventoy , extract the files, and launch the Ventoy2Disk application.
If you have a USB stick already inserted to your PC's port Ventoy will detect it automatically. If there are several of them, there will also be an option to select the desired one.
Click the install button and Ventoy will be installed in your USB drive shortly. To confirm this you can see that your drive's name will change to Ventoy.
If you already have an Operating System image, proceed to copy it to your USB drive. In our case we are going to use Ubuntu Iso image. This process will work with almost any OS image out there. You are not therefore restricted to using Ubuntu only.
Step 3: BIOS setup
After copying the iso file, switch off your PC and boot to the BIOS manager. To do this, power on your PC and press the the Esc key almost immediately. Hopefully you will see a list of options listed starting with a function key and some title.
At this point, we need to first make sure that UEFI mode is enabled in BIOS setup. This varies from machine to machine but look for an option most probably under boot options to change from legacy to UEFI mode or disable Legacy mode.
You might also have to disable Secure boot in some cases but you can skip this for now and do it later if you do encounter such an error. If you do disable secure boot, make sure you trust the site you download your ISO file from.
Step 4: Booting into the new OS
In the first BIOS screen, look for the option on Boot Menu, maybe F9 for example. You will see a list of options which might include you hard drives, and USB hard drive. Select the USB hard drive option.
If you get any errors, you might have to go back to the BIOS menu and look for a way to disable Secure boot and maybe disable Legacy mode or enable UEFI.
Select your preferred OS from the list and boot into it. For most of the Linux based OS's you will have to select boot in normal mode and then select try or install <OS>. In our case try or install Ubuntu.
Hopefully your OS successfully boots. You can try it out without having to install it by using the USB drive.
To install the OS select the Install Ubuntu option. The rest of the steps should be rather simple since they include;
Selecting your language, keyboard layout and connecting to a network (optional).
You can choose Normal installation or minimal installation. I would recommend a normal installation.
If you connected to a WI-FI network you can also choose the option to download updates while installing Ubuntu. Choose this option if only your connection is fast enough.
If you had already created a partition for installing Ubuntu proceed to step 6.
Step 5: Create a partition during installation process for Ubuntu.
If you had not created a partition earlier, on the next window, select install Ubuntu alongside Windows Boot Manager option. (It will most probably be the default option) and click continue.
You can change the amount of space to allocate to Ubuntu by dragging the divider between the 2 partitions. You can then click install now.
This will create a partition on your hard drive and install Ubuntu on it.
Step 6: Select Something else.
Look for the partition created earlier right click on it and select change.
Make it an ext4 journaling system and select the format disk option. For the mount point, select /. If the partition reads as an ext4 type and not ntfs or something else proceed to install Ubuntu.
Make sure it's the exact one selected before clicking install now.
Some files will need to be copied into your hard drive and Ubuntu will be installed in your PC after a few minutes.
Congratulations! You just installed Ubuntu alongside Windows.
