31 July 2017

Creating a dual boot with Windows and Ubuntu when you have UEFI

People on many blogs say that you have to disable secure boot when you have UEFI and want to install Ubuntu alongside Windows 8 or 10.
Not necessary. You don't even have to switch to Legacy boot.

The basic concept to understand is, that if you have UEFI, you'll have to tell the boot manager where to find your boot file. That's all.

After a lot of searching and ending up at all the wrong blogs and posts, I finally found this post. Worked perfectly!

The steps are:
  • Install Windows, leaving a separate partition for Ubuntu
  • Install Ubuntu on that partition
  • Reboot and enter BIOS screen
  • Follow the steps here about selecting grubx64.efi
  • Save and exit BIOS

That's it! You've got a dual boot system. Grub will show you the options for booting into either Windows or Ubuntu.
If anything goes wrong, you can always press F12 when starting your computer to see the boot options.

Oh btw, don't disable secure boot. It's a very important feature that prevents your system from getting infected at boot time, by malware that might be in an external drive that's connected to your PC at boot time.

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