Ubuntu – How to deal with Windows 8 Boot Partition

Initially, you have to free space on your hard drive. Right-click the C: partition and choose Resize option. I recommend you to free 50+ GB. Then you should add 3 new partitions: swap, Ubuntu and home. Simply right-click on free space and choose appropriate option to do this.

Swap usually takes the exact amount of your RAM and has purposes similar to Windows swap, but you're permitted to make it of any size, depending on how hard your computer is loaded. Big swap can help you run more applications when you have small RAM, but slows performance. Ubuntu partition is the system partition. It contains the kernel, boot files, GNU executables and related stuff. For most cases it should be about 20 GB, but 10 GB is enough too if you not plan to install many packages. And the remaining space (~20 GB) you can give to home partition which is analog of user's folder in Windows.

After you install Ubuntu, you can add some symbolic links pointing to your music, pictures and videos on Windows partition from the home folder for convenience and salvation of free space.

Conversion of Dynamic disk to Basic disk is the first step, as recommended by Microsoft (who no longer recommend Dynamic Disks): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/basic-and-dynamic-disks

However, first make a backup of your data, then verify it matches the source files. Then, make a second backup to a different destination (drive or cloud), and verify it matches the source files.

While in Windows, download and extract TestDisk, an open source app, then we will follow instructions courtesy of http://surenseven.blogspot.com/2012/11/converting-dynamic-to-basic-disk.html

1. Launch the testdisk_win.exe app.
2. A window should open up. Create a log file if you want to or just go ahead without creating one.
3. Now it must show your physical disk followed by the partitions and of any other devices connected to your PC. TestDisk does a great job of this. It can even detect drives that Windows can't due to various reasons.
4. Select your physical drive and proceed. TestDisk will automatically figure out your partition table type.
5. Proceed to the next step and click analyse. It will provide you with the findings. Now hit quicksearch.
6. Now the trick is to use your arrow keys to toggle between the options. Once you see a ' P' stop and proceed (P for primary) ,select '*' for your system drive which is the active boot partition.
7. Once you've made your change press enter and toggle with your arrow key to choose 'WRITE".
8. Restart your PC into Windows.
9. After it restarts, click Start, type Run, type cmd, and then click OK. On the command line, type chkdsk to scan for errors. If any errors are found, type chkdsk /f on the command line to fix these errors.

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Once conversion to Basic is complete, you can install Ubuntu, starting by booting from a LiveUSB.

In Step 6, Allocate Disk Space, look for the top option, named Install Alongside Windows Boot Manager.

Choose that top option, which will prompt you for your choice as to how much space Ubuntu should take. Since Ubuntu can mount, read from, and write to the Windows NTFS partitions, you will be able to easily access files in the Windows portion of your drive.