Dual Boot Windows and Ubuntu Linux in 10 Minutes (2026)

In this video, I'm going to show you how to dual boot between Windows and Ubuntu, but in this example, I'm going to be using Ubuntu 26. 04 LTS, which has recently been released at the time of this recording. So, on this laptop, I'm going to restart it. So, I'll restart Windows. Laptop is restarting. As you can see there, it's booting and we have a grub menu, which allows us to boot into Ubuntu or boot into Windows. So, in this example, I'll boot into Ubuntu. And there you go, you can see that I've booted into Ubuntu. Now, in this example, I'm mirroring the screen, so the resolution is quite low. But, what I'll do here is restart the computer again. Computer is now rebooting and now I can simply select Windows. So, select the Windows boot manager to boot into Windows. And there you go, I'm back in Windows. And once again, all I need to do is click restart and I'll be able to boot back into Ubuntu. Okay, so I'll select Ubuntu and there you go, I'm back in Ubuntu. Now, I can change the display settings and let's join the screens rather than mirror them. So, I'll make the main screen the built-in screen and click apply. And there you go, you can see that Ubuntu 26. 04 is running on this laptop at a decent resolution. And what I could do here is start up Firefox as an example. I'll maximize this and I could go to a website such as my website and there you go. So, in this video, I'm going to show you all the steps. I'm going to show you how to download the ISO from ubuntu. com. Rufus. I'll show you how to write the files to USB flash drive, how to boot off this, install Ubuntu and set it up so that you can dual boot between Windows and Linux on a laptop. Have a look at some of my other videos, which I've linked below if you're interested in dual booting between Windows and a different version of Linux. There are many options available when it comes to Linux, but in this example, I'm dual booting Ubuntu and Windows 11. One thing I'd like to

point out is that you can use secure boot when booting between Windows and Ubuntu. So, what I'll do here is shut the computer down. So, restart it. So, when the computer reboots, use the special key on your laptop or computer to boot into BIOS. On this laptop, it's the escape key. That'll really depend on your device. Under security, I can see that secure boot is enabled on this laptop and I can discard my changes and [snorts] reboot and then boot into Windows. So, there's no problem using secure boot on a laptop if you're dual booting between Windows and Ubuntu. Now, before you do anything, like I'm going to do in this video, we're going to change partitions, etc., it's a really good idea to back up any important data in case something goes wrong. So, make sure that you back up your data before proceeding with the installation that I'm showing you in this video. Okay, so let's get started downloading and

installing Ubuntu on this computer. So, first thing I'm going to do is go to the Ubuntu website. So, go to ubuntu. com/downloads/desktop. We now have Ubuntu 26. 04 LTS available for either Intel or AMD architectures or ARM architectures. In this example, I'm using an Intel computer, so I'm going to download that image. It's about 5. 9 gigs in size. So, I'm going to save that to my computer. Let's have a look at the system requirements. So, you need a 2 GHz dual processor or better, 6 gig of system memory, so remember that, 25 [snorts] gig of hard disk space, either a USB port or a DVD drive with installation media, and internet access is helpful. They also have documentation if you want to read that where they talk about the fact that you need to download the ISO, create a bootable flash drive with an image writer and boot your laptop or PC from the USB flash drive. So, we've completed step one, downloading the ISO image. The next

thing we need to do is download Rufus so that we can write that image to a USB memory stick or flash drive if you prefer calling it that. So, on the Rufus website, I'm going to scroll down. I'm going to download the portable image for Windows X64. They do have a newer release of the software available, but I'm going to use the portable image and save that to my computer. You could also download the standard file and install it if you prefer, but I'm just going [snorts] to use the portable image. Now, my Ubuntu ISO hasn't downloaded yet. So, what I'll do is double click on the Rufus EXE file and notice here, Rufus update policy. Do you want to allow Rufus to check for application updates online? I'm going to say yes here. If you're very privacy conscious, you might want to say no so that you don't get updates, but I'm going to say yes so that I get

updates. We need to specify the drive to install the image onto. So, I'm going to insert my USB flash drive into the computer and once I've done that, we should hopefully see it show up here, which we can. USB drive, 128 gig. The next thing we need to do is specify our image that we're going to write to the USB flash drive. So, I'm going to click select and in my downloads directory, notice I can select this ISO that's now downloaded. So, I'm going to click open. Now that we've done that, I'm going to leave everything else at the defaults and click start to write it to the flash drive. There are two options here. We can either write an ISO mode, which is recommended, or DD image. Now, if you have issues with the ISO image mode, then try DD image mode. But for now, I'm going to just go with the recommended option here and click okay. We're warned that everything on the drive will be erased. I'm okay with that, so I'm going to click okay. — [snorts] — And as you can see, it's now deleting partitions, it's creating partitions, formatting the drive and then writing the master boot record and then it's going to copy the images to the flash drive. All you need to do now is wait for that to complete. Okay, now that the USB flash drive has written successfully, I'm going to click close to close Rufus. And in Explorer, you can see that we've got Ubuntu 26. 04 written to the flash drive. Now, before

we can install Ubuntu on the computer, we need to do a few things. One of the first things you're going to want to do is disable BitLocker. You can't install Ubuntu if you have BitLocker enabled. So, make sure that you turn off a BitLocker on your computer if it's on. On this computer, it's currently off, but make sure that you check that BitLocker is disabled and if it's disabled, then disable it. You can find the BitLocker options under Control Panel, System and Security, BitLocker Drive Encryption. Now, on the Ubuntu documentation, if you tried to install Ubuntu, so in other words, dual booted while you had BitLocker enabled, you're probably going to see something like this. And we're told that you need to either cancel the installation of Ubuntu and continue using Windows only, decide that the data stored in Windows is not important and that you're going to override it, or decide to turn off BitLocker. And that's what we've decided to do here. They also give you documentation on how to disable BitLocker. It might take a while, however, if you've got a lot of information on your computer. But in my example, it's now disabled, so I can install Ubuntu on this computer. Now, the next thing we need to do is check

the partitions on this computer. So, I'm going to right-click on the Windows icon and go to Disk Management. This shows me the disks on disk zero. That's the disk that we're going to install Ubuntu on, in other words, dual boot. You can see we've got Windows here, about 1. 8 terabytes. This is using NTFS. We've also got a system partition and a recovery partition. What I would generally do here is take a screenshot of this or write down the information so that you remember the partitions on your computer for reference. We can also see our Ubuntu flash drive here, but the important thing here is this Windows partition needs to be made smaller so that we can install Ubuntu on the same disk or same SSD on our computer. Now, in an ideal situation, you would have different SSDs or different hard drives for Windows and Ubuntu. However, in this example, I've got a laptop with one SSD. We want to dual boot between Windows and Ubuntu on that single drive. So, what we need to do here is repartition this drive. So, on the Windows partition, I'm going to shrink the volume to make space for Ubuntu. Now, in the documentation once again, we're told that we only need about 25 gig of free hard disk space. However, in my example, I'm going to give Ubuntu half a terabyte. You can decide how much space you want to give to Ubuntu and keep for Windows. This is a 2 terabyte drive, so I'm okay to shrink it by half a terabyte. So, I'm going to shrink the volume on Windows. Notice, there's the Windows partition. Here is the unallocated space now for Ubuntu. Now, you don't have to do this through Windows. You could do it during the Ubuntu installation. I prefer, however, to do it this way, so that's why I'm doing it like this. And there you go, we've now got the computer ready to

install Ubuntu. And there's different ways to do this. You could do this through the BIOS, but what I'm going to do here is shut down the computer while pressing the shift key so that I can specify that the computer needs to boot off the USB flash drive. So, I'm going to press the shift key down and I am going to get the computer to restart. So, as you can see there, the computer is restarting. You can see it's booting up now. And now we can choose an option. So, we're going to use a specific device in my example, which is my SanDisk USB flash drive. So, I'm going to tell it to boot off that drive. Now, again, you don't have to do it this way. You could simply reboot the computer and then use the special key on your computer to bring up the boot menu or go into BIOS and specify that you're going to boot off the USB flash drive. So, in my example now, notice we can try or install Ubuntu. So, I'm going to select that option. Okay, Ubuntu is booting up now and there you go, we can choose our installation options. You need to specify your language. So, in my example, I'm going to specify English and click next. I'm going to click next again for accessibility in Ubuntu. Specify my keyboard. In my example, this is a US keyboard, so I'm going to specify that. In my example, I'm connected to the internet using a wired connection. You could connect to a Wi-Fi network if you wanted to or not connect to the internet, so I'm going to click next. So, we have two options now. We can either install Ubuntu or we can try out Ubuntu. Now, in my example, I want to install Ubuntu, so I'm going to click next and I am going to do it through an interactive installation. So, I'm going to click next again. You can specify which apps you want to install. I'm happy with the default selection, so I'm going to click next. I am going to install third-party software for graphics and [snorts] Wi-Fi hardware and I'm going to download and install additional media formats and click next. You don't have to do that if you don't want to. So, what are we going to do? install Ubuntu alongside the Windows boot manager? That's the whole idea of this video. We're going to dual boot between Windows and Ubuntu, so that's what I want to choose. You could erase the entire disk and install Ubuntu, but that's going to wipe Windows, so we don't want to do that. And you can go for a manual installation where you specify a whole bunch of additional options. So, it's more of an advanced selection. I'm just going to go with the default of installing Ubuntu alongside Windows and click next. Do we want to encrypt the drive? In my example, I don't want to do that, so I'm going to say no encryption and click next. We now need to specify our username, so I'm going to specify David and David laptop one as an example. Specify my username. Specify my password. It's a weak password. You should use a good password, but this is a lab, so I'm okay with that. I am not going to require my password to log in. You should do that, but this is again just a lab, so I'm okay to allow Ubuntu to automatically log in and I'm going to click next. So, for the real world, make sure you use a good and set it up to log in. Now, I'm based in the UK, so it's picked that up, so I'm going to click next. So, you can now review your choices. Once again, we're not going to mess with Windows. We're just going to install Ubuntu alongside Windows. So, have a review of the partitions that it's going to set up. As an example, it's going to create and format this partition for root, which I'm happy with, so I'm going to click install to install Ubuntu. So, what it's doing now is it's going to copy the files and start the installation process. Now, this is going to take a while, so I'll speed up the video at this point. Okay, so there you go, Ubuntu is installed and ready to use, so I'm going to click restart now. Okay, so we're now told that we need to remove the installation medium and then press enter, so I'll remove the memory stick from the computer and then I'll press enter to reboot the computer. Computer is rebooting and notice now we have a GRUB menu where

we can specify Ubuntu, so boot from Ubuntu, or we can boot into Windows. So, let's boot into Ubuntu. And there you go, we've now booted into Ubuntu 26. 04 on this laptop. So, we're told welcome to Ubuntu 26. 04 LTS. We can look at the release notes, but in this example, I'll click next. I'm not going to enable location services. send data to Ubuntu. I'm going to click next. I prefer dark mode rather than light mode, so I'm going to specify dark mode. I'm going to click next and I'm going to click finish. So, we now have Ubuntu running on this laptop. I could open up a web browser as an example and go to my website. So, we are connected to the internet on this laptop. Now, I've mirrored the screen between my laptop and my computer here so that we can see this more clearly. Now, one of the things you may want to do is connect to a Wi-Fi network if you haven't done that already. I'm using wired ethernet here, so I'm okay with that. What I'll do simply here is restart the computer to show you that we could reboot back into Windows. So, the

computer is now rebooting and what I'll do here is specify Windows boot manager rather than Ubuntu so that we can boot into Windows. And there you go, I've now booted into Windows. So, again, I could restart the computer and in this case boot, hopefully, back into Ubuntu. So, computer is rebooting. We've got our GRUB menu and what I'll do here is specify Ubuntu. And there you go, we are back in Ubuntu. I've reduced the resolution a lot here so that the screens are mirrored, but again, what I could do is simply restart the computer back into Windows if I wanted to. So, I'll specify Windows boot manager here and there you go, Windows is now booting up. And there you go, we're back in Windows. So, that's how you can dual boot between Windows and Ubuntu.

Hopefully, this process has made it a lot easier for you. If you have any problems, please comment below. Also, let me know which videos you want me to create. I'm David Bombal and I want to wish you all the very best.