Setting up elementary OS next to Windows without losing your data

Dual booting elementary OS alongside Windows is a sensible compromise for anyone in Australia who needs to keep proprietary software for work or study while still enjoying the calm Pantheon desktop. Plenty of readers between Brisbane and Perth rely on Microsoft Office for uni assignments, Xero for the family business, or Lightroom for the side photography gig, and none of that has to disappear just because you want to explore Linux. The process has matured a lot in recent releases, and with a steady NBN connection it is realistic to download the official ISO, verify it, and be installing in under an hour from the comfort of your study nook.

This walkthrough assumes a single physical drive with Windows already installed and EFI firmware, which covers most laptops sold through JB Hi-Fi, Officeworks, or the usual online retailers since about 2016. You will create free space on the disk, flash a USB stick, disable a couple of Windows and firmware features that block Linux installers, and finish by repairing GRUB so both systems show up at boot. Take it slowly, read every screen, and remember that almost every step can be undone.

Preparing your Windows machine before anything else

Before any partitioning tool opens, your Windows installation needs a quick health check. Press the Windows key, type "Defragment and Optimise Drives", and run the optimiser on your main drive. Fragmentation alone rarely blocks a Linux install, but it makes shrinking the NTFS partition much more predictable. While there, head into Settings, then System, then Storage and clear out anything obvious you no longer need. A typical install of elementary OS only needs around twenty-five gigabytes, but giving it a comfortable fifty or sixty leaves room for AppCentre caches, projects, and the occasional Steam game.

Next, open Disk Management from the Start menu. Right-click your C: partition, choose Shrink Volume, and enter the amount of space to release. On a 512 GB NVMe drive this is usually a painless exercise of giving Linux between one hundred and two hundred gigabytes. Pick unallocated space rather than a separate partition for the moment; the installer can carve it up properly later. If Shrink Volume refuses and only offers a few hundred megabytes, reboot, disable hibernation with powercfg /h off in an elevated Command Prompt, and try again.

Backing up what matters before you touch partitions

Partitioning is reversible, but human error is not, so back up first. Plug in an external SSD from the shelf at your nearest Officeworks — the cheaper Crucial X9 and WD My Passport models are more than enough — and copy across Documents, Pictures, the OneDrive folder, and anything else you would hate to lose. Australians have an unfortunate habit of stuffing years of tax returns into the Downloads folder; this is the moment to drag those PDFs somewhere safe.

If you are already paying for Microsoft 365 through a family plan, make sure OneDrive is fully synced before unplugging. A quick glance at the system tray icon will tell you whether the little green tick is showing. Once Linux is running you can point its built-in backup tool, Deja Dup, at the same external drive and schedule automatic snapshots, but for now the goal is simply to have one clean copy of anything irreplaceable outside the laptop.

Building a bootable USB stick the easy way

The elementary OS download page offers a direct ISO, and at typical Australian NBN speeds the 2.8 GB file arrives in well under fifteen minutes. Hashing the file with the SHA256 value listed next to the download button is worth the extra minute; a corrupted ISO is one of the few things that can derail an otherwise smooth install. For the USB stick itself, any eight-gigabyte drive from the accessories wall at JB Hi-Fi will do, and it does not need to be fast — UEFI reads from these slowly enough that even a no-name brand works fine.

On Windows, balenaEtcher and Rufus are the two tools most people reach for. Etcher is friendlier because it has almost no options to misconfigure, while Rufus gives finer control if your firmware is fussy about ISO mode versus DD mode. Pick the elementary OS ISO, pick the USB stick, click Flash, and wait. When the process finishes, do not open the drive to see what is inside; Windows will simply complain about an unreadable filesystem and that is fine.

Tweaking UEFI settings the Aussie way

Restart the machine and mash the firmware hotkey during the splash screen. On Lenovo models this is usually F2 or Enter followed by F1, on HP it is Escape then F10, on ASUS it is F2 or Delete, and on Dell it is F2. The exact key will flash briefly in the bottom corner if you blink at the right moment. Australian retailers stock plenty of Acer and Microsoft Surface devices too, and Surface hardware requires holding a volume button while pressing power to enter UEFI.

Inside the firmware, three changes matter. Disable Secure Boot under the Security or Boot tab; elementary OS supports Secure Boot these days but turning it off removes a class of odd installer failures that are painful to diagnose later. Disable Fast Startup under the same heading if your manufacturer exposes it there — Windows has its own version too, but the firmware one is the relevant switch for Linux. Finally, set the USB stick as the first boot device or use the one-time boot menu, usually reached with F12. Save and exit, and you should land on the elementary OS live environment.

Walking through the elementary OS installer

The live desktop is the real Pantheon environment, so take a moment to poke around. Open the Files app, confirm the wireless card is working, plug in your AU keyboard layout from the top-right menu, and check that audio plays. Once you are happy, double-click the Install elementary OS icon on the desktop. The installer walks you through language, keyboard, downloads — tick the box if you want non-free firmware, which is helpful for many Broadcom and NVIDIA chips found in consumer laptops sold locally — and arrives at the installation type screen.

If you see an "Install alongside Windows" option, accept it. The installer will create the standard ext4 root partition, a swap area, and an EFI system partition shared with Windows. If that option does not appear because of a quirky partition table, choose "Something else" instead, point the free space you created earlier at ext4 mounted as /, allocate a swap area roughly the size of your RAM if you have sixteen gigabytes or less, and let the installer handle the EFI System Partition automatically. Set the timezone to Australia/Sydney, Australia/Melbourne, Australia/Brisbane, Australia/Adelaide, Australia/Perth, or Australia/Hobart depending on where you live, so the clock is right from the first boot.

Bringing GRUB back so both systems appear

When the installer finishes and the machine reboots, you should be greeted by a dark GRUB menu listing elementary OS on top and Windows Boot Manager underneath. If elementary OS boots directly without showing the menu, do not panic — it just means the previous EFI entry from Windows has been overwritten, and the fix is quick. Boot into elementary OS, open the Terminal, and run sudo os-prober followed by sudo update-grub. The first command should detect the Windows Boot Manager, and the second will rebuild the menu with both entries.

If os-prober stays silent, install the package with sudo apt install os-prober, run the same two commands again, and reboot. On rare occasions the UEFI itself forgets the boot order; in that case enter firmware setup, find the Boot tab, and reorder the entries so elementary comes before Windows Boot Manager. Australian laptops that shipped with a customised Lenovo or HP UEFI sometimes bury the Linux entry under a sub-menu labelled "Boot From File", worth a quick scroll through if Windows keeps winning the boot race.

First-boot polish on the Pantheon desktop

The first thing most people want to do is run updates. Open the AppCentre, click the circular arrow icon at the top-right, and let the system pull in the latest kernel, Mesa drivers, and Pantheon refinements. Elementary OS releases roughly every two years and patches regularly in between, so this initial update can be sizeable. While it runs, visit System Settings and adjust the display scaling, the time format to 24-hour if you prefer, and the regional format to Australian English so number separators and dates render the way you expect.

The AppCentre also handles paid apps, which is handy because several Australian-made tools, such as local weather clients and accessibility utilities, are sold there by independent developers. For developers, the using elementary OS as a daily driver for web development guide covers everything from Node and Docker setup to Git signing, and is worth bookmarking once you reach the point of making Linux your primary environment. A few small touches — turning off the dynamic workspace indicator, pinning favourite apps to the dock, and enabling night light for those long summer evenings in Adelaide — round out the experience.

The thing to take away is that dual booting is not a permanent commitment. The elementary OS partition can be deleted later through Windows Disk Management, the EFI entry removed with bcdedit or a quick trip into firmware setup, and the USB stick repurposed as a regular drive. Once both systems are showing up at boot, you have the freedom to spend a week living entirely in Pantheon for personal projects, then reboot into Windows for that inevitable BAS lodgement or final uni assignment. That flexibility, more than any single feature, is what makes elementary OS such a rewarding neighbour on a shared drive.