Hello!
I wasn't sure where I should post this...here or in the Windows forum, but then I decided to just slip it to the end of my "Linux Adventures" thread.
For my quad core workstation, I have a 250 GB hard drive that I'd like to use for testing Ubuntu/64 Studio or other Debian distros.
But I also wish to use it for Windows 7 Beta testing.
The question is; which OS should I install first? I'll probably reinstall Win7 several times between now and its August 1st deathdate, then after that, I probably won't use Windows on this drive.
As for the Linux side of it, I plan to install one or two or three distros over time, then eventually settle on one (the ultimate goal is to start using 64 Studio) and maybe continue to use this spare hard drive for Linux on an ongoing basis. Sometime in the fall or winter, I'll probably build my "production" 64 Studio system on a brand new drive.
How do you think I should set up the drive? Linux first? I'm thinking maybe yes, since one version or another of Linux will be on this drive for a number of months.
But then won't Windows 7's boot loader be slapped on the drive? And what happens when I need to (or want to) wipe out an OS and re-install? Or when I ultimately delete the Windows 7 environment? And what happens if I want to temporarily add a third OS down the road?
Hmmmm, maybe I just need a crash course on boot loaders.
By the way, this is just an old drive that I used for disk image backups. My music sample and MP3 libraries got really big though, so the 250 GB drive was too small for that purpose, so last year it went into a storage box. But now I'm taking it out of retirement to do some testing. At first, I'll have no production work or applications on this environment. It's only test for now, so I'm not afraid of shooting off my foot or anything, but at the same time, I'd like to avoid wasting
extraordinary amounts of time with dumb beginner bootloader mistakes...
Thanks in advance for any direction you can give me!