…with Windows Vista / Windows 7 installed first.

So you got a computer running Vista and like to dual boot between Vista and Ubuntu. The boot loader that ships with Vista can be a real pain. There are some nice utilities we can use to make that process a lot smoother for us. Here we go.

First you’ll need space for the Ubuntu installation. If you don’t already have a partition for it, right-click My Computer -> Manage -> Disk Management. Right-click on the main Vista partition and select Shrink Volume. The Shrink tool will assess how much space you can free up. (If you don’t have enough free space, Vista will not allow you to shrink it and the available space to shrink will be zero) You should have at least 12GB of free space for the new OS, if you don’t have that much it’s probably time for a new hard drive.

Next step is to prepare your installation USB drive, unless you already burned it on a CD/DVD. Follow our detailed instructions in this article. Insert the usb stick, or the CD/DVD and reboot. Check you system for booting from USB, usually you have to press a function key to select from possible boot media.

Follow the standard installation instruction during the Ubuntu install, choosing the newly created partition as target. You also can import accounts and personal folders from Vista, if the Ubuntu installer detects it. Everything else should be pretty straight forward. Once the installation is finished, let the system reboot and you will have a boot menu with listings for Ubuntu and Vista.

So far, all should be well and you can boot to Vista or Ubuntu using GRUB. Unless you want Vista to be in charge of the boot process, you’re done. The next step will explain how to revert back to the Vista boot loader and add Ubuntu as a choice of OS.

Boot to Ubuntu and copy the contents of the boot menu so that it is available in Vista. Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal). Then open menu.lst (sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst) and copy/paste it into a text document and save it onto the Vista partition. Alternatively you can send it by email or save it onto the USB memory stick. Then reboot into Vista.

Now we need the latest version of EasyBCD by Neosmart Technologies - download it here and install. Then, go to “Manage Bootloader” and select “Reinstall the Vista Bootloader”, then “Write MBR”.

This puts the Vista bootloader back into the MBR, but the machine will only boot into Vista at this time.To enable access to the Linux partition, the best option is to install NeoGrub. Go to “Add/Remove Entries”, go to the NeoGrub tab and select “Install NeoGrub”. This adds the “NeoGrub Bootloader” option to the Vista bootloader. Then choose Configure – this launches the NeoGrub menu.lst file, location at C:\NST\menu.lst. Use Notepad or Wordpad to open the file, and then paste in the boot entries that we copied from Ubuntu.

Save and exit, then reboot the machine. The system will come up with two boot options. Select “NeoGrub Bootloader” and then the Linux boot options will load. Choose the relevant option and the system boots into Ubuntu.