Install Ubuntu on Windows laptop (dual system)

• Laptop: Mechrevo wujie14 pro

Check bios mode

In windows, press Win+R and find msinfo32 to check bios mode.

If it’s not UEFI (for example, Legacy), you need to swith to bios mode, and change the Boot.

It’s UEFI in my laptop, no need to worry.

Check GUID Partition Table

In Disk Management, check the property of disk. If it’s not GUID Partition Table (GPT), you need to open cmd and input

diskpart

list disk

then select disk and convert:

select disk=0

convert gpt

list disk

It’s UEFI in my laptop, no need to worry.

Trun off Bitlocker

Press Win+I to open settings, and turn off the bitlocker

Prepare Ubuntu boot drive

1. Download Ubuntu iso, for example, I choose Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS.

2. Create a bootable USB flash drive with balenaEtcher.

   I tried similar software, Rufus, but can not find the ubuntu boot option in bios, probably due the missing UEFI file.

Spare memory space for Ubuntu

1. Install DiskGenius

2. Open DiskGenius, and select a volume, for example D, and choose compress volume, adjust the volume size to get freee space. Here I spare 300 GB spaces for Ubuntu.

Modify UEFI and MSR partition

This doesn’t seem to be a necessary step, because after I finished the installation, the new UEFI took up only 64 MB, less than the original 100 MB

But just for in case, I enlarged the UEFI volume to 400 MB.

It comes with following steps:

1. remember the start and end indices of each partitions

2. backup the UEFI files

3. modify the volume of Windows parition to spare additional 300 MB spaces in font of the windows partition

4. delete and recreate the UEFI and MSR partitions

5. modify the start and end indices of UEFI and MSR partitions

   For UEFI, the start is same as it was before, and the end is extended to include additional 300 MB spaces.

   And the MSR is using the spaces between UEFI and Windos partition, mantianed to be 16 MB in my case.

If you mistakenly delete the UEFI and MSR files without backup, you need to reboot from a PE system with DiskGenius, regenerate the UEFI and MSR partition, and use the Windows UEFI recovery tools to recover it.

Install Ubuntu

1. swith to Bios mode

   • Directly use the Adanced Startup in the Windows Settings

   • Or restart the mechine and press hotkey (ESC in my case)

2. choose boot from usb drive, to boot and install Ubuntu.

Install grub2 themes (Optional)

We can install grub themes to change the start up menu:

git clone https://github.com/vinceliuice/grub2-themes.git

For exampel, I use the Whitesur:

sudo ./install.sh -t whitesur -c 2880x1800 -b

To uninstall:

sudo ./install.sh -r -t whitesur

Reference

https://blog.csdn.net/2401_84064328/article/details/137232169
https://www.cnblogs.com/ay2021/p/15151630.html