I woke up today with a clearer head than yesterday. 8)
And realized with an MBR BIOS booting system, the BIOS sees each disk as a whole.
So, if I wanted to leave my Windows installation entirely intact (for safety, because the PC is used by other people), then I would need to have the GRUB bootloader on another disk.
But I want to use my SSD - which currently has a Windows Vista OS partition and an unused empty Windows partition (saved for a second OS) - for LL 3.0 .
Then the idea came to me - can I specify my other internal (slow) hard drive (used for data) as the location for the new GRUB boot loader in "Something Else" ?
Then I could use the unused SSD space for the actual LL 3.0 OS files (root).
After backing up my data from the Windows part of the SSD, I gave it a try and it worked fine.
I specified the slower hard drive "sdb" in the location for the boot loader, and then had Something Else format my empty additional D: partition for ext4 and mount "/" there and then I had it carve out 2gb for "/swap" as well and format that as well.
After the installation, when I rebooted, it went into Windows as normal - no problems.
Then in rebooting, I hit F12 and had it boot into the slower hard drive and then, sure enough, GRUB appeared and after the requisite 10 seconds, launched LL 3.0 .
So, not only is "Something Else" a great Miles Davis tune, it also will partition and format easily and simply, and will put GRUB bootloader whereever you want.
And realized with an MBR BIOS booting system, the BIOS sees each disk as a whole.
So, if I wanted to leave my Windows installation entirely intact (for safety, because the PC is used by other people), then I would need to have the GRUB bootloader on another disk.
But I want to use my SSD - which currently has a Windows Vista OS partition and an unused empty Windows partition (saved for a second OS) - for LL 3.0 .
Then the idea came to me - can I specify my other internal (slow) hard drive (used for data) as the location for the new GRUB boot loader in "Something Else" ?
Then I could use the unused SSD space for the actual LL 3.0 OS files (root).
After backing up my data from the Windows part of the SSD, I gave it a try and it worked fine.
I specified the slower hard drive "sdb" in the location for the boot loader, and then had Something Else format my empty additional D: partition for ext4 and mount "/" there and then I had it carve out 2gb for "/swap" as well and format that as well.
After the installation, when I rebooted, it went into Windows as normal - no problems.
Then in rebooting, I hit F12 and had it boot into the slower hard drive and then, sure enough, GRUB appeared and after the requisite 10 seconds, launched LL 3.0 .
So, not only is "Something Else" a great Miles Davis tune, it also will partition and format easily and simply, and will put GRUB bootloader whereever you want.