i have a new machine that has two hard disks that are both accessable from vista (ugh!). Do I need to change a partition before laoding linux or does the install allow me to just use drive E: (already defined) for linux. I did want to keep the machine as a dual boot (for now anyhow). Also , I'm using Fedora, in case that matters. Thanks.

linux won't install to "E:" that is a windows notation and won't exist under linux in any way. just choose the relevant partition under the installer and you'll be off. you'll probably want to delete it and let fedora use the remaining space as it sees fit - a small /boot and a larger LVM partition will probably be created by it.

I know this sounds stupid but I'm not sure about the partitioning. the machine has two 320g hard disks. the second one is labled e: by windows and is empty. I would like to use this entire disk for linux, so how is it chosen during installation if linux doesn't recognize e:?

During install of most Linux distro's it will offer to format a partition for you. BEFORE doing an install make VERY SURE that you can correctly identify where it is going to create the partition. You do not want to destroy your current install.

Linux has a different more logical notation for storage devices. In this case the devices would be labelled as /dev/hda (drive attached to primary ide) and /dev/hdb (drive attached to secondary ide inteface); translation dev=storage device hd=hard drive. The partitions are signified by numbers after the device e.g. /dev/hda1

Most linux any how the one I use will show at a moment with drives are in you,re box Mostly also with the vendors name
For example in my case WDD 160 WDD 250 ST 160 being 2 drives Western Digil one Seagate drive beside that the also give
the linux notion being in my case SDA SDB SDC and of course also the partition of each disk
So you can decide on with drive it should install and also on with partition of that drive as example for the SDA it is SDA1 SDA2 and so on depending how many partition are in each drive.
And you have also have to decide where to put GRUB

all the best