Vijay_grr8 :
I'm Dennis...This is my first ever question on this forum...I wish to know if i can create some kind of disk partition such that my bios shows me 2 hard disks...for example...1 tb harddisk partitioned into half-half TB...This idea came to me when i came across the idea of bootcamp on macOS..Please answer me..I'm really curious...I want to install win7 on half tb....and ubuntu on the other....When in boot into either of the OS, only half partition should be accssible at that time...I dont want the files which are on the windows eco-system to interfere with my linux system...Thank You
I'm unaware of a partitioning method that'll let your BIOS see a single physical disk as two physical disks - by most chances, this isn't possible (this is something controlled by the firmware/microcode of the drive and/or HDD controller in your motherboard, and partitioning won't alter this).
However, what you're trying to do is very much doable.
Simply create one primary partition, and leave the rest of the HDD as unpartitioned space. Format the first partition as NTFS and install Windows FIRST.
Next, go ahead and install Linux in the unpartitioned space- Linux installer will guide you on creating Linux partitions, follow on-screen instructions (be careful in this step as an error might wipe off the Windows partition you created, or prevent Windows from booting by making unintended changes to the boot loader).
Reboot. Your computer will now show a menu, asking you to choose an OS, and will show Windows and Linux as available options.
Now select Windows, you'll see Windows won't display the Linux partition. This is by design as Windows does not support EXT3 or other Linux-native file systems without the use of 3rd party drivers. You can still see the Linux partition if you open "Disk Management" in Windows, but this won't be an issue in general everyday use, as Windows will NOT be able to read/write anything from the Linux partitions and it won't show the Linux partitions in "This PC"/ "My Computer"/ whatever they're calling it these days. The only reason it'll show the Linux partitions (you'll need to create more that one partition for a proper Linux installation, at least 3 partitions, one for /boot, one for /, and one for /swap) is for an extreme situation where you are no longer interested in Linux and want to wipe it off and make the entire HDD available to Windows, OR in case you want to install 3rd party drivers and read/write to the Linux partitions from within Windows.
Next, restart the computer and boot to Linux, you will see that you're allowed to read files from the Windows partition, and in some distros you might even be allowed to write to the Windows partition. This is an "unwanted" behavior in your case (although I personally consider this to be an advantage- MP3s, Movies, Documents I save in Windows can be easily read/edited when I'm in Linux). But this feature of Linux can be very easily overridden. All you need to do is log in to Linux with root privileges, and edit the /etc/fstab configuration script and make the appropriate changes there to prevent Linux from automatically mounting the Windows partition on startup. In everyday usage, you will not use the root account of Linux, you will create a normal user account (equivalent to a non-administrator account of Windows), and if you try to access files in the Windows partitions, depending on the distro you will either receive an "ACCESS DENIED" error, or an "Enter Password" message where you will need to type in the root account's password to access the files. As long as you don't enter the root password in this screen, Linux will not be able to read/write from the Windows partition.
How to edit the /etc/fstab depends on how Linux is addressing the Windows partition (first partition of the first hard drive is usually hda1 or sda1 in Linux). This is beyond the scope of "storage" forum. Once you have finished installing both Windows and Linux, ask this question about editing /etc/fstab in the "open source software" section of Tom's.
And by the way, welcome to Tom's Hardware
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