So I've watched videos all night and read articles on how to install linux on a windows laptop. I downloaded Ubuntu from the website, and I don't have any empty cd's around so I decided to just use my thumb drive to install it from. I downloaded a universal usb installer and burned the image from my downloads onto my drive. Now when i boot in my bios, i go to the BIOS menu and see the hard drive, usb, and two other options. However, there are no sub menus for me to go into and I'm confused on how to access my thumb drive and boot into linux and install it onto my hard drive. It's also plugged into a 2.0 port. Any tips/advice would be appreciated on how to do this! Thanks!
From your bios, go to the boot menu and just select that usb drive. Or change the boot order and put your usb drive above your hard drive.
If neither of those work, your motherboard might not support booting from usb. I'd be surprised if that was the case, though.
I messed around with that last night and selected usb and hit enter and nothing happened. I also changed that order and my laptop wouldn't even boot so I switched it back. Any other ideas? I'm completely stuck and want to get this installed
Are you sure the image was copied to your usb correctly? Did you use this (http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/)? Also in your bios you'll often see more than one option for usb, like USB-HDD, USB-FDD, USB-ZIP etc., try them all.
To make it easier try disabling booting from your HDD (just set 1st boot device to one of the USB options, and the others to CD-ROM) then you won't have to wait for your system to boot and shut down, you'll only get an error saying your computer can't find any bootable device.
Also one more question, So i got linux installed and chose to install it along side windows, partitioned it and everything. Now i used codeblocks this past semester at university, and i want to access all my .cpps, and my other documents as well. How do i do this and transfer information easily across the operating systems? I did find codeblocks when i went into the drive but didn't get far with finding anything.
When using the file explorer in Ubuntu, you should be able to access the C: drive like any other drive, it should just appear on the left hand side panel. If you save things to your Ubuntu documents folder, you can't access them from Windows.
Go into the windows drive>user>yourusername>Docuements(or where ever your store your projects. You may need to set mount options to allow you to execute. Tell us any errors you may get.
Another way to do this would be to use MEGA: https://mega.nz/
You can get MEGA sync on both windows and linux and so they'll sync together when you make changes as well as that you can go onto another computer and get your files off the site. You may have heard of dropbox. The reason I recommend MEGA is because you get encryption as well as 50GB free space!
@shadowmouse
You can access the Linux drive, there are many 3rd party applications out there. If encryption is enabled then it may prevent him accessing documents.