Dual Operating system on a laptop?

[C-Death]

Hello everyone. I have an HP Pavilion laptop that came pre-loaded with windows 7.

I was wondering
1) Is it possible to dual-os Ubuntu and windows 7 on the same machiene?
and
2) Would there be any risk of harm to the laptop in doing so?

Editing with a little more information:
I have 184GB of HDD space left (can easily clear around 300GB if needed)
8GB Ram

 

[Ghan]

I would shrink your existing partition and create a new one to install Ubuntu on.
It never hurts to back up your data before doing anything like this, but it shouldn't cause any issues if done correctly.

The only danger is that Ubuntu may hijack your Windows bootloader, meaning that if you want to boot into Windows, you'll have to go through grub to do it. If you ever want to delete Ubuntu entirely, the best thing to do then is to use a Windows 7 install disk and do a recovery on the partition to have it reestablish the bootloader. (This does not install a new copy of Windows and doesn't touch the data on the drive)

 

[C-Death]

In regards to using a windows 7 install disk, my laptop didn't come with one. Rather, I had to manually make one with a DVD+R disk and the windows tool for it. Would that be the backup?

 

[Ghan]

I don't think so. That sounds like a password recovery disk or something. You need to have a disk that has the Windows recovery tools on it. Not sure if that one would or not.

 

[C-Death]

I double checked to make sure, and it is indeed a windows recovery disk. Thanks for the advice. Just went through partitioning my disk (I only gave it 100GB for Linux, hope that ends up being enough) Thanks for the help!

 

[Slapshot136]

I double checked to make sure, and it is indeed a windows recovery disk. Thanks for the advice. Just went through partitioning my disk (I only gave it 100GB for Linux, hope that ends up being enough) Thanks for the help!

you can re-size the partitions later as needed.. Linux does a better job than windows at that, use GParted to do this