The first thing you want to do when you are dual booting is to go into your BIOS menu (when you first boot up and pres ESC or something to enter the boot menu), and turn safe booting off. Then you want to boot up in your Windows OS if it is installed, and turn fast booting off in the advanced settings in your power settings. This is necessary in order to install linux and be able to boot up in it once installed. If you have neither OS installed, I recommend installing Windows first because if you install it after installing linux, it overwrites the bootloader, and you cannot boot in linux. This can be fixed by booting up your live disc/usb, installing your bootloader on that, rebooting with the media still connected, choosing your linux partition, then installing the bootloader on your native install. So basically, I will list some simple steps in order for you to get started.
1. disable safe booting in the BIOS
2. disable fast booting in Windows (if installed)
3. if not installed, install Windows on 1/3 of the Space on your hardrive. This is recommended if you have at least a 300 GB hardrive. Just 1/2 it if it is about 200 GB. Dual booting is not recommended on a small hardrive.
4. If windows is already installed, open Create and Format hardrive partitions, and shrink your windows partition to a reasonable yet smaller size while leaving about 100 GB for your linux partition. You are free to format and label that 100 GB of free space for later, as you will have to pick out your partitions and keep them straight while installing linux. I would label it something like "FORLINUX." If you can spare a double-digit GB besides the 100 GB, it is recommended to use as a medium between Windows and Linux partitions, and I recommend you format it as NTFS because both Windows and Linux recognize it, and you can store and move large files on this file system.
5. Burn the Linux ISO to either a USB or CD-RW. A good portable ISO to USB burner is Rufus, which I recommend because it paranoidly checks the ISO before burning it.
6. Reboot your computer with media inserted, and interrupt startup, and choose the media that you are booting from, and press enter. I am going to use Linux Mint for example.
7. double click install linux if it does not automatically start. Enter in everything that applies to you, but when it comes to how to install Linux Mint (alongside, over, or something else) choose something else, which brings you to the partition manager. One partition should already be labeled as Windows, so don't disturb that one at all. The 100GB (100000 MB) that you probably labeled and formatted is what you should be interested in.
8. Take the 100GB (100000 MB), and take about 3000-4000 MB for a swap partition. Take the remaining 906000 or so MB, make 1/4 of it dynamically allocated ext4 and tagged "/root", and the other 3/4 of it dynamically allocated ext4 and tagged "/home". This sets it up for a Joe Shmoe user so you aren't logging in as root (admin) all the time.
9. You are now ready to install linux. Sometimes the installs are a little quirky such as not installing a bootloader, so you have to install the bootloader (such as grub) on the installation media by opening up a terminal using ctrl+alt+t and typing "sudo apt-get install grub" on a debian/ubuntu-based system. reboot, and select your native installation of linux, then install the bootloader the same way you installed it on the installation media.
10. reboot, and see if both your operating systems still boot up. Check windows: if you haven't disturbed it at all during the installation of linux, then it will probably still work. Then reboot and check linux. It might take a little time to boot up natively for the first time. It should lead you the select username and login style, which won't take long. After that, you are pretty much set. There is also a weird trick that you can do with hibernating either operating system, and being able to boot into the other operating system while the other is hibernating. I haven't really played with this, so do at your own risk.
If you reboot, or wake up from suspend with a black unavoidable screen, then it is probably your display drivers. Switch to fglrx. If you can't even log in normally, then you have to boot up in linux recovery, enable networking, go to command line, enter in your root password, then "sudo apt-get install fglrx" then wait for it to get done, then reboot. It should work now. If it does not work, then do your research.
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