Run Mint alongside Windows

The process for getting Linux Mint installed on your computer’s hard drive is pretty straightforward – when you know how.

You’ve had a play with Linux Mint and you’re ready to take your first steps proper into Linux. But there’s no need to ditch Windows just yet. We’re going to step you through the process of installing Mint alongside Windows, complete with a special boot menu that appears when you start your PC, enabling you to choose whether to load either Windows or Mint.

Back it up!

Now is the time to take a complete backup of your hard drive as it currently stands, before setting up Linux Mint.

Install MacriumReflectFree ( www.macrium.com/ reflectfree.aspx) in Windows for the job. Once installed, launch the program and start by selecting Other Tasks> Create Rescue Media to create a recovery CD/DVD or USB flash drive (a 512MB drive is sufficient) – you’ll need this to boot from to recover your hard drive if things go awry.

Once created, click ‘Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows’. Select a suitable location on your backup drive and click Next. Ignore the backup plan screen – you’re taking a

one-time backup – and click Next followed by Advanced Options. Select Auto Verify Image and tick the box to verify your backup once it’s been created. Click OK followed by Finish>OK. Once your fail-safe backup has been created and verified, you’re ready to install Mint. The walkthrough takes you through the process, but there are several points where it helps to have a bit more explanation, so keep reading to find out all you need to know to make sure your install is successful.

Partition your drive

Because you’ll be installing Mint alongside Windows, you’ll have to ask Windows to budge up a little and give Mint room. We do this by partitioning your hard drive. This involves resizing the Windows drive to make it smaller to give Mint enough space to run. As a bare minimum Mint needs around 20GB plus however much RAM is installed on your PC, but if you can spare it then consider 32GB as a comfortable minimum, and don’t forget to leave sufficient free space for Windows too – 5GB as an absolute minimum, preferably more.

The step-by-step guide reveals how to repartition your Windows drive using the GParted partition manager, which is preinstalled in the Mint live environment. It assumes you have a single hard drive on your PC and that there’s enough free space to squeeze Mint on next to Windows. If you’re short on free space, either embark on a proper clear-out of your Windows installation or consider either upgrading your existing drive to a larger model or – if there’s a second drive bay available in your PC – adding another hard drive exclusively for housing Mint. (May we suggest you go down the SSD route? Your PC will thank you.)

If you run into problems partitioning using GParted as outlined in the walkthrough, we recommend booting back into Windows and using a free partition-editing tool there to complete the task – try AOMEIPartition

StandardFree ( www.disk-partition.com) for example. It works in a similar way to GParted.

The other area that may cause problems during installation is when you come to choose your installation type. If you have a single hard drive with just

Windows on it and free space, you should be fine, but if the option to install Mint alongside Windows Boot Manager doesn’t appear, make sure you select Something else and click Continue.

Now you’ll need to select the free space and create two partitions: the main partition on which Mint will be installed, and a swap partition, which Mint uses for virtual memory. Create the latter first: click the + button and set the swap file size to match your RAM (so 4,096 for 4GB, 8,192 for 8GB, and so on). Select Swap area under Use as and choose ‘End of this space’. Click OK.

Now select the remaining free space above the newly created swap partition, click + again. This time, verify all remaining space has been allocated, the file system is Ext4 journaling and then set the Mount point: dropdown menu to /. Click OK, check the device for the boot loader installation matches your Windows/Mint drive ( dev/sda on a PC with a single hard drive) and click Install Now.

Should you run into problems with any stage of the installation you can roll things back right to the beginning of the process – including undoing any botched partitioning – by restoring your MacriumReflect backup. Simply boot from the Reflect rescue media you created earlier to be taken to the program’s main interface at the Image Restore screen. If your backup isn’t automatically listed, click ‘Browse for an image file’ to select it. Once done, verify the correct disk has been selected, then click Next followed by Finish and Continue. Once restored, go back to the beginning of this section to try again.

Create a back- up partition

After installing Mint – see step 12 of the walkthrough – you’ll be invited to set up system snapshots, which is a great way of backing up your Mint installation in case of disaster (think of it like System Restore, only better). While you can store your snapshots on your Mint partition, it’ll quickly fill the disk and you’re not protected against drive failure. We recommend creating a dedicated partition on your back-up drive formatted to Linux’s Ext4 filesystem – this involves repartitioning that drive in the same way you set up your main drive to

accommodate Mint. A 100GB partition should be more than sufficient for your needs.

GParted isn’t installed in Mint itself by default. So you can either boot from the live disc and repartition from there, or install GParted from SoftwareManager (Menu> Administration). Type gparted into the Search box, then click it from the list followed by Install, entering your user password when prompted. You can now launch it from Menu> Administration. You need to enter your user password to run it; that’s because it requires admin privileges to make changes to your hard drive. Once launched, select the back-up drive from the

/dev/sda drop-down menu, then resize the NTFS partition. Once done, right-click the unallocated space and choose New. The default settings should be fine – verify the filesystem is Ext4 and give it a name if you wish. Click Add followed by the tick box to apply the changes.

Configuring updates

Unlike Windows Update, Linux Mint’s update mechanism won’t force new updates on to your system, but it will take the trouble to alert you to their presence. When you first run UpdateManager as part of the setup process, you’ll be prompted switch to local servers to speed up the delivery of updates: click OK and then click the US server name to select a UK alternative. Once selected, future updates to your system will be delivered that little bit quicker.

After you’ve used UpdateManager you’ll be able to access it easily via its shield icon in the bottom right of the toolbar, which will alert you to new updates when it turns blue (if it turns red there’s a problem – click it to open and find out what it is. You can also right-click the icon for more options: Refresh performs a fresh check for updates; Information gives you a precis of recent changes; and Preferences makes it possible to tweak certain settings. As an aside, this is where you go if you decide you want Mint to apply updates automatically, via the Auto-upgrade tab.

Once you’ve finished, you’re now ready to start enjoying your new Mint installation. Turn the page to start using it.