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I have a windows 7 Professional Laptop that has had the entire drive encrypted so as to require a password to allow it to boot up.

There is only one partition on the drive that takes up the entire drive and its an NTFS one for Windows 7.

Can anyone suggest a good method that will allow me to install Ubuntu Linux on the system as well without disrupting Truecrypt and Windows???

Or am I to assume the easiest method is to unencrypt the drive so its just windows again, install ubuntu, then encrypt the drive?

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  • Have you tried installing ubuntu with the WUBI installer?
    – Rob
    Dec 8, 2011 at 17:44

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Changing drive geometry cannot be done to an encrypted volume. If you stop & think about the situation for a moment... without knowing what is full of data and what isn't... how can you reliably re-size the volume?

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  • i did suspect this was going to be the case, that due to the drive already being encrypted it was not possible. so as i mentioned am i to assume the best practice here is to decrypt the drive, install ubuntu alongside windows then re-encrypt the partition?
    – Kristiaan
    Dec 8, 2011 at 16:47
  • If that's what your requirements are... then yes. Honestly, encrypting drives is dumb... and typically results in complete data-loss in the event of a normally recoverable disk failure. (not to mention the additional CPU/DiskIO overhead) You'd be better off buying a laptop with built-in disk encryption rather than turning to true-crypt.
    – TheCompWiz
    Dec 8, 2011 at 16:53
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    The TrueCrypt docs say this plain as day, too: Encrypted partitions cannot be resized except partitions on an entirely encrypted system drive that are resized while the encrypted operating system is running.
    – Flimzy
    Apr 29, 2013 at 6:05
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Another option is to install Ubuntu on a virtual machine, using something like VirtualBox.

The user experience is very similar to a native installation, and even offers advantages such as removing the necessity to reboot and allowing features such as machine state saving.

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