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Lets just say I have 3 hard drives:

c: 500 gig windows 7 with win7 boot loader
d: 1tb nothing on it (but I want a Linux os on it... Ubuntu, debian, fedora ect)
g: 3tb random stuff

I want Ubuntu and grub on drive D but I want to boot my computer normally and only boot into grub and Ubuntu when I do an advanced startup and select an alternative boot device (the 1tb hard drive). Is this possible with Ubuntu and other Linux distributions? Also do all distributions require you to make a Linux swap partition?

Oh and lastly could I multiboot different distributions such as slackware and archlinux on the D drive and have grub come up with all the os's on the D drive when I boot from it? Even multiboot stuff like older versions of windows and DOS or even hackintosh?

Henry WH Hack v3.1.0a
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12padams
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3 Answers3

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1. Of course you can install Ubuntu on Hard Disk Drive D (I am not talking about 
logical disk drive). While installing Ubuntu, it would
offer a page, in which you select the Hard Drive on which the OS
should be installed. This option is there in pretty much all the
operating system installers.

2. You can even install multiple operating systems on the same drive (D), the 
bootloader corresponding to the last operating system which you install on that 
drive will show up and list all the operating systems available on that drive.

3. You can read about sharing the swap space

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5656/are-there-any-side-effects-when-two-distros-share-a-swap-partition

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thefourtheye
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If the Advanced Boot option is in BIOS, then yes, you could use your D: drive to install GRUB and multiple Linux distros. I have a dual-boot system with Debian on the primary drive and Ubuntu on a secondary drive and GRUB comes up on boot and I can boot to either system.

The swap partition is standard in Linux. The link in the other answer weighs the pros and cons of sharing a swap partition.

douggro
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What you want to do is install ubuntu on your 'd:' drive, and put grub on it. not c:, but d:. Then you can use something easy like EasyBCD to add an ubuntu entry to your Windows 7 Bootloader. This way, your windows is untouched and grub+ubuntu is on it's own drive.

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Scott Goodgame
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