Ubuntu won't install alongside windows 7

Ubuntu won't give me the option to install alongside a working windows install?
Can anyone help me and give me some suggestions why it won't work.
Thank you.

Weird, maybe try using gparted and shrink the Windows partition. It should work but if not make room for Ubuntu manually then go through the install.

How many partitions do you have? Maybe check with Windows or GParted and post the screen shot here.

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Originally Posted by sammiev

How many partitions do you have? Maybe check with Windows or GParted and post the screen shot here.

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There are 3 partitions, one system health partition of 100mb, a windows partition which is 458gb and unallocated which is 451gb

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Originally Posted by grier-devon

Weird, maybe try using gparted and shrink the Windows partition. It should work but if not make room for Ubuntu manually then go through the install.

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Thanks for the reply, I have already done this through windows disk management.

Thanks guys, and other suggestions?

You need to break that unallocated area into few more partitions by selecting ''something else'' while installing Ubuntu through Gpart which will appear automatically. (Not through Windows partition manager)

Those partitions are
/ = root made up of about 20 GB. This needs to be formatted into ext4.
SWAP = In equal size as your RAM. This will be dealt by gparted automatically as soon as you make it and select SWAP.

That is minimum and you can add few more as you need, like;
/home = anything above 30 GB (Would be good to keep it around 100 GB). This needs to be formatted in ext4 as well.
Format rest into NTFS storage area by making it separate logical partition. I say NTFS because then you can access it from both windows and linux. Windows can't read ext4.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LastDino

You need to break that unallocated area into few more partitions by selecting ''something else'' while installing Ubuntu through Gpart which will appear automatically. (Not through Windows partition manager)

Those partitions are
/ = root made up of about 20 GB. This needs to be formatted into ext4.
SWAP = In equal size as your RAM. This will be dealt by gparted automatically as soon as you make it and select SWAP.

That is minimum and you can add few more as you need, like;
/home = anything above 30 GB (Would be good to keep it around 100 GB). This needs to be formatted in ext4 as well.
Format rest into NTFS storage area by making it separate logical partition. I say NTFS because then you can access it from both windows and linux. Windows can't read ext4.

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Am I able to change the swap at a later date as I plan to upgrade to 16gb of ram from my current 8gb when it arrives in the post.
I want to fix the underlying issue when the installer won't detect windows as well though.

Yes, you can change swap any time - see this tutorial for a howto.

I suspect your installer didn't offer you the option of installing alongside Windows because the rest of your hard drive was unpartitioned space. Try creating an ext4 root partition (along with all the others that LastDino suggested) while running Ubuntu from a live CD. Then try the installer again.

Looking at your RAM amount, I'm curious. Is your system new? Is it UEFI or Legacy? Please check that before doing anything and which Windows is already installed anyway?

If it is UEFI, you need to do few more things.

Btw, with 16GB RAM, I might forget about making SWAP all together.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by LastDino

Looking at your RAM amount, I'm curious. Is your system new? Is it UEFI or Legacy? Please check that before doing anything and which Windows is already installed anyway?

If it is UEFI, you need to do few more things.

Btw, with 16GB RAM, I might forget about making SWAP all together.

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My computer is 2 months old, pretty much brand new so I'm guessing it's not that legacy one. What do I have to do with the UEFI? I'll do some google searching on this.
Thanks again.

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Originally Posted by blake8

My computer is 2 months old, pretty much brand new so I'm guessing it's not that legacy one. What do I have to do with the UEFI? I'll do some google searching on this.
Thanks again.

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https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

You can start from reading there, this is just the start though. You can search this forum for similar topic, I'm sure there are dozens of threads addressing the very same thing.