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I have just purchased a Asus Zenbook UX32VD and it will arrive on Monday. However, I do not know how to dualboot Ubuntu on this, because of two reasons:

  1. It is a hybrid 500GB HDD + 30GB SSD, therefore the OS has to be smart enough to use the SSD to speed things up. But what does this mean when selecting partitions etc. while installing Ubuntu next to Windows 7?

  2. It does not have an optical drive; windows 7 is preinstalled.

What steps should I follow to dualboot Ubuntu on this correctly? Will this cope with the HDD+SSD hybrid technology?

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Actually it's is not a hybrid HDD on the ux32vd but a separate small iSSD on the MOBO. So you have two distinct drives. –  user80110 Jul 29 '12 at 18:23
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4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Yes, I realise the question is old, but is also one of the first Google results when searching dual boot on this machine.

As the iSSD is used as a cache by Windows, you don't want to install Ubuntu there unless you disable the Windows cache.

As the comment on your question says, the hdd is not cached like that of the Seagate XT drives, but is two distinct drives: ssd on the motherboard, and hdd. Windows is set up to use the SSD as a cache.

You have a couple of options:

  1. Install Ubuntu on the hdd alongside the Windows install by creating a new partition and installing to that. Ubuntu should be able to use the SSD as a cache, but not sure.
  2. Turn off the caching in Windows and put ubuntu on the ssd using the method shown by Daniel.

Either way, you'll want a swap on the HDD (on the SSD will kill longevity) as well as a dedicated Linux data partition - Ubuntu can read/write ntfs, but is generally not a good idea to take that for granted.

Here's some partitioning advice - when creating partitions, Linux will need at least / and swap ( or you can use a swap file). It's generally considered a good idea to also have a separate data, or /home. This is for a couple of reasons: if you need to reinstall the OS ( and this goes (especially?!) for Windows as well), you don't then have to go backing everything up and transferring hundreds of GB of data, and; if you fill the data partition then it won't mean a lack of space for Linux to do its required operations in /, in which case it might fall over in a heap. Some Linux admins will advocate having separate /boot, /usr and /var as well, and it is still not a bad idea in the server space where uptime is king, but it's less essential on the desktop.

If it's your first foray into Linux, I'd suggest keeping the /home partition small to begin, and at the end of the drive so it's easier to resize later if you want more room.

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Thanks. I personally took the slow HDD out and installed Windows on a 256GB SSD. Then I installed Ubuntu on the iSSD. –  Tom Mar 30 '13 at 11:00
Pretty much the same thing I'm going to do, except in reverse - Arch Linux has been my sole OS for the past 2 years, and before that I used Ubuntu at home and at work, so I'd rather it had the big SSD all to itself and Windows can sit on the little one with a game or two :) Did you have any issues setting it up? Using EFI? –  MattJenko Mar 30 '13 at 17:21
I did not have any issues because I am using two separate HDDs. Therefore I don't need to worry about dualbooting. I just tell the BIOS to use to default drive unless I press ESC during boot, then I can choose the Ubuntu SSD and it will load that. This way I don't need to worry about EFI or anything, which is good because I'm no expert. –  Tom Mar 30 '13 at 21:00
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When you get to the part of installation where it asks you to select a hard disk to install ubuntu on and select something else.

enter image description here

Select your smaller ssd drive and create a new partion from the empty space on that disk (it won't actually look exactly like in the picture since it's a virtual box)

enter image description here

Now select your hdd and make a new partition as big as you want your data partition to be (probably not too big cause windows needs a lot). enter image description here

Finally on your hdd make a swap partition using 4 or 5 gigabyte enter image description here

Now at the bottom of the page select your ssd for the bootloader installation and hit 'Install now'

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Thanks for this. Are you sure the swap should be on the HDD, not the SSD? Seems to me like a SSD swap would be a lot faster. –  Tom Jul 30 '12 at 9:34
technically that's true, but in reality (at least in my experience) the swap is rarely used anyways. My notebook has 4 gigabyte RAM and only uses swap when I'm running virtual machines with more than 2 gb RAM and even then it only uses 100 mb. So I would say use the ssd only for / cause all software you install from software center will be installed in /usr so you want to have some space left there. –  Daniel Jul 30 '12 at 11:11
Has anyone gotten this to work on a UX32VD? I had attempted something pretty similar, but I can't seem to boot into Win7. Every time I attempt to from grub, I get an error for invalid EFI filepath. –  Nick Aug 11 '12 at 3:12
As soon as you log bq –  MattJenko Mar 30 '13 at 5:04
Sorry, stupid enter key! Am typing on a tablet, apparently it took longer than 5 mins. The answer doesn't take into account that as soon as you log back into windows, its going to use the issd as a cache and hose your Ubuntu installation. This is a bad thing. Check my answer (forthcoming), I am about to buy this machine and run dual windows/arch linux. I realise this question is old, but is one of the first results when I searched dual boot for the ux32vd. –  MattJenko Mar 30 '13 at 5:13
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Ubuntu doesn't have to be smart. It's you who decide where you want your Ubuntu installed, in 500G HDD or 30G SSD.

You need to know which partition is the one where you want to install Ubuntu, then within the Ubuntu installation you should choose that partition, choosing that you want Ubuntu runnin along Windows.

After that, everytime you boot your laptop, you'll be giving a menu (GRUB) so you can choose what Operating System to boot.

Because you don't have an optical drive you can boot Ubuntu from a USB pen or install Ubuntu from within Windows.


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Thanks, but won't it interfere with the Hybrid Drive technology? Windows will use the 30GB SSD as somekind of cache (the SSD is hidden too). If I install Ubuntu there, won't that create issues? Also how does Ubuntu setup the Hybrid drive? –  Tom Jul 27 '12 at 18:10
I'm not sure if you can write on the SSD, therefore installing Ubuntu directly on the SSD may not be possible. But if you install on the HDD, i believe Ubuntu will take advantage of the speed of the SSD. So my advice is just install Ubuntu along side Windows. –  LnxSlck Jul 28 '12 at 0:07
I bet the base windows system is installed on the ssd to make it boot and resume faster. All application and user data is likely stored on the hdd. So I would examine how much space is left on the ssd and if it's like 10 or 15 gig make an ext4 partition set the mount point to / and set the bootflag. Then make a partition on the hdd for your data and set the mountpoint to /home –  Daniel Jul 29 '12 at 18:37
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Just as I see the ssd is almost empty my machine boots after I formatted it, but I yet have not been able to boot the linux from ssd, I got the latest 32vd with W8 though.

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