Install Ubuntu on a second harddrive without messing with other drives or main Windows 7 bootloader?

Question

When viewing things like the task list, the date format does not honour regional settings in some browsers on some platforms. Is there a way to have the date format support regional settings? It seems it defaults to the peculiar US month/day/year format, which is extremely annoying and confusing.

Surely the default should be something that is unambiguous and in a format that is common to most people?

Solution

1. Of course you can install Ubuntu on Hard Disk Drive D (I am not talking about 
logical disk drive). While installing Ubuntu, it would
offer a page, in which you select the Hard Drive on which the OS
should be installed. This option is there in pretty much all the
operating system installers.

2. You can even install multiple operating systems on the same drive (D), the 
bootloader corresponding to the last operating system which you install on that 
drive will show up and list all the operating systems available on that drive.

3. You can read about sharing the swap space

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5656/are-there-any-side-effects-when-two-distros-share-a-swap-partition

Comments

[a2r]

What's wrong with using grub? You can configure grub, that it boots windows as default automagically, and does only show up when you hit a key on the bootscreen. Yes, you can multiboot various distros together, even older windows stuff but this is very annoying to configure. Btw: I really enjoyed your "Ubuntu replace Windows"-Video ;)

[Admin]

I'm looking for this too. Boot loaders are fine but usually means I can't just rip out the windows drive or the ubuntu one and shove them in another machine by themselves.

[12padams]

Thanks for the help. So you would recommend installing another windows on that partition first and then Linux because I've heard the windows boot loader doesn't play well with grub and overwrites it/doesn't let you boot Linux.

[gosalia]

The HDD design you mentioned in the question, looks good. You can use 500G HDD for Windows, 1 TB HDD for Linux flavors and the 3TB for Random stuff. As you correctly mentioned in the above comment, windows overwrites any other bootloader and it doesnt detect any other operating system apart from its own family of OS. So, if at all, you want windows also in D, the only way to do it is to install Windows first, and then install all the linux flavors.

[12padams]

Would you recommend unplugging my other internal hard drives every time I install an OS on the D drive or should they be safe? Can constantly unplugging them cause problems with the computer immediately or down the track?

[gosalia]

You dont need to unplug the hard drives. The installation wizard will let you select the hard disk drive on which the Operating System should be installed. I am not very sure about the problems because of constantly unplugging :(

[RobG]

This doesn't answer the question: Is there a way to have the date format support regional settings?. In Safari or Firefox, AtTask doesn't use either the computer or regional settings in AtTask preferences. I would expect it to support d/m/y unless English (US) was chosen.