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Originally Posted by Chriscrof
My computer has two hard discs; one contains Windows 7 and the other is completely empty and has a capacity of 160 GB. I want to install Ubuntu and another distro - possibly Fedora - on the empty HD
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The more complicated decisions will be in how you set up the initial boot code and the drive numbering to work with different OS's on different drives.
You must decide which drive should be physically drive zero (you might swap the cables at some point during install if the current drive zero isn't the one you want for drive zero).
Assuming your BIOS allows this, you would decide which drive boots first. The BIOS would then pass data to the boot code telling the boot code to pretend the booted drive is drive 0, even if it physically isn't.
If the Linux drive boots first, you can configure the menu choice for Windows to make it pretend the Windows drive is drive 0 when giving control to Windows. Since Windows was installed on drive 0, it would be quite difficult (but not impossible) to make it work when booted on what it is told is drive 1.
Windows will entirely accept whatever the next earlier boot step tells it about which drive is 0 vs. 1. I don't think the same is true of Linux. I forget details, but I think most parts of Linux will see the true physical drives 0 and 1 as sda and sdb. So if your boot process is messing around with which drive is which, you need to be careful of the details of which drive is which when.
The simplest method would be to swap the cables so the Windows is on physical drive 1. Linux boots first on the true drive 0, and its boot menu includes a choice for Windows, which swaps the drive identities, so Windows boots on physical drive 1, thinking it is 0. While that is the simplest choice, it is far from the only choice.
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Should I partition the drive first so that it is ready for two distros or should I install one of the distros first and then let the second one do its own partitioning?
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I don't recall Ubuntu or Fedora install dialogs well enough to really guide you on that. Most of the times I have installed Linux, I have found it easiest to pre partition the entire drive the way I want it (using gparted in some Linux liveCD) before running any installer.
Most Linux installers I've used (especially Centos, which I've installed the largest number of times) have a fairly clear option for either "existing partitions" or "manual", in which you can select from existing partitions and set their mount points.
But I have used Linux installers in which I couldn't figure out the way to use existing partitions. Then I needed to select the choice to use unpartitioned space. Anyway, be careful not to choose "use entire disk", since it probably would take your windows drive instead of or in addition to the empty drive.
In your situation, I would create a swap partition to be shared by both Linux installs and a / partition for each Linux install. I would not split /home or /boot or /var or any of the other commonly split areas.
You got earlier advise to split /home from / because that supposedly makes reinstalls easier. I've done reinstalls on several different Linux versions and never found that having /home separate from / made anything easier. There are enough distribution specific user settings in /home that installing Linux without trashing a new /home has never been practical for me.
For reinstall, I always:
1) Use gparted on a liveCD to shrink all the partitions of the existing install small enough that there is room to install a new version in unpartitioned space.
2) Install.
3) Reboot back and forth between versions a few time while copying files and settings from old to new and testing and comparing.
4) Destroy the old partitions.
5) Use gparted to expand the new partitions.
I always split /tmp from / but as a tmpfs not a disk partition. Then /tmp uses ram or swap, whichever is dynamically best moment by moment. /tmp should only be used for files you don't mind being auto deleted on every reboot. Many Linux distributions do auto delete the contents of /tmp on reboot. With a tmpfs, those contents are already lost before reboot, which is no worse. For files that are stable and read many times, file caching works better than a ram disk, so the many people that ask how to use excess ram as disk in Linux are generally misguided. But for files that are typically created and read once then deleted, a ram disk or tmpfs works much better than caching. A large fraction of such files are in /tmp, so a tmpfs will produce better performance than a partition (or a portion of the / partition) for /tmp.
If you plan to have massive amounts of user data (such as if you plan to edit home movies on that computer) you should have a separate user data partition. That is very important for reinstall, since that data would be too big to have twice during the reinstall process I described earlier. Typically, you would then want several soft links in your /home/user directory pointing to subdirectories within the mount point of the user data partition. So operationally the data seems to be in subdirectories of your own home directory.
If your large data is things like home movies, that are best imported and edited in Linux, but you then want to be able to play them in Windows, it may be best to keep that data on the Windows drive.
Reading and writing data on a Windows partition instead of a Linux partitions is only a very minor inconvenience from Linux. (Linux programs and setting are somewhat trickier on a Windows drive because of differences in secrity semantics).
If you have big user data and want to access it from Windows and don't have room on your Windows drive, then you can make your user data partition for Linux be an NTFS partition compatible with Windows. That will take a little extra attention to security and permissions issues, but is quite workable. A key factor is that user data would not directly contain user home directories, only subdirectories linked from user home directories.
If user data or some other partition brings your partition count up to four or more, you will find it more flexible to work with logical partitions rather than primary. For best flexibility in resizing, you could make the entire drive one extended partition and make all the Linux partitions logical partitions inside that extended partition.
