Hello, new to Linux and I'm about to load Linux onto my computer so I can have windows and Linux on two separate Hard drives, I have been watching a good install video to do this however the person giving this video does not say if GRUB has to be installed before the Linux installation or that GRub is already installed on my computer via windows.

If I need to download this pgrm where do I find it and how do install it?

Thank you for your time and thought on this matter......:O)

Do you have two physically separate hard drives, or two partitions on one drive? This makes a huge difference, depending on what you want to do.

Which Linux distro do you plan on installing? If you can give linux its own drive...what you can sometimes do is tell your BIOS/UEFI to boot from your linux drive, then when grub comes up you could have the option to boot linux or windows - even though windows resides on another drive.

Letting windows have boot priority tends to not go well for linux...or at least, historically it hasn't worked out well.

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Do you clearly understand what GRUB is, what it does, and how it affects your system?

If you ordinarily wish to use "two entirely separate operating systems," I would put [Linux ...] on an external drive that is strictly-Linux. Then, you can do things one of two ways ...

One way is to select the Linux startup-disk when you reboot your computer.

Another way is to use a virtual-machine monitor (VMWare, VirtualBox ...), running under a Windows host, to run Linux in a virtual machine. Because modern microprocessors have extensive hardware support for VMs, this is a very credible alternative.

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It can be if you have another Linux operating system. Otherwise, it is part of the installation process and will be installed with the operating system you have chosen.

A definite no to that. Default windows systems can't write or even read a Linux filesystem much install a Linux bootloader.

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Well Thanks for answering my post. I will address both your questions as I see I have not given enough information.
I will be running Linux mint I already looked at it and am happy with it.runs fine on my computer off the cd disk.
I have two hard drives installed in the computer one has windows on it and the other is a 1 terabit hard drive that is empty, which i intend to use as the boot up and data drive with partitions.
My system is intel 2 duo cpu e7500 @ 2.93GHZ with 4 GB Ram 64 bit OS.
As I understand it GRUB allows the operator to switch the operating systems at boot up to either windows or Linux. this seems easier than doing it through the bios.
I know nothing about a virtual box or what it does I shall do some investigation now on it. Thanks for your help really appreciate all of you. :O)

OK so I need not worry about grub as it will be installed with the Linux software but
what about using virtual box what is the real advantage of this program for having two os?
Thank you for your time and thought on this matter......:O)

To clarify: GRUB is a "boot loader." It's the thing that runs first, and its primary job is to let you select and then boot a particular operating system. It lives in a very small initial partition and it has its own "file system." It is configured by ordinary text files. It is capable of reliably booting both Linux and Windows, although it necessarily does the latter by handing-over control to Microsoft's own proprietary loader ... which can, depending on exactly how it has been configured, might or might not present problems. (OEMs and admins can do various things to [try to] "lock down" the Microsoft boot process.)

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I don't see any information in your posts about which windows version you are using. If you have windows 8 or newer and it is pre-installed, it is almost certainly using UEFI/GPT. If that's the case you need to install Linux Mint using UEFI. You can find information on UEFI dual booting at the link below. It's specifically Ubuntu, but everything on the site should apply to Mint also.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI

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Thank you all for your info I need to do some more research bye....:O)