(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); This is a fairly simple question, and I don't think it'll cause me any trouble as I'm pretty confident everything will be fine.

So, I'll try to keep this short. I have a computer, currently running Windows 7. Said computer has two hard drives. Not one hard drive & two partitions on the table, two physical hard drives. Let's call one 'HDD A', and the other 'HDD B'. HDD A is 1TB in size, is not partitioned, and has Windows 7 installed on it. HDD B is 1.5tb in size, also not partitioned, and is currently blank. Well, it has a few files on it, but it will be formatted shortly.

I want to install Kali Linux on HDD B, and leave HDD A completely untouched, or at least as untouched as practically possible. I'm fairly familiar with Linux, and I know that it will want me to install the Grub boot loader to the master boot record. The only issue is, I have only ever installed Linux, and then Windows, not the other way around.

So on to the actual question: Will installing the Grub bootloader for a Linux installation on HDD B, affect the master boot record for the entire system, or just the boot record for HDD B?

I think I'll be fine, and I should just be able to chose which HDD to boot from the boot menu & BIOS, but could it potentially affect my Windows 7 bootloader on HDD A, leading to a potential f***-up? I always back my files up before doing anything like this, I'd just like to not have to re install Windows, again.

Believe it only affects the boot record for HDD 2. You have to select HDD 2 to load linux
Could be wrong but from my understand how it works.

Okay, thanks for the reply.
I'll give it a go & hope for the best!

If anything you can set your HDD A to always boot first and if you want to switch to Linux just restart and boot from HDD B

Well, tonight I witnessed Murphy's law in action.
Linux installed fine, and supposedly only modified the bootloader on HDD B. However that wasn't the case... I could no longer boot in to Windows as it had replaced the boot loader on both HDD A & B. This didn't present itself as a huge issue, as all I had to do was tweak Grub to recognize Windows on HDD A. This wasn't the case... After a couple of hours trying to get Grub to recognize Windows on HDD A, I gave up & deleted Grub bootloader via a live boot Linux distro. This went perfectly. What didn't go perfectly was trying to re-install the Windows bootloader to the MBR. Over the past 6 & a bit hours, I've been relentlessly trying to re install it using the Windows Repair feature on the install DVD, and either it wouldn't recognize that Windows was anywhere to be seen, or it wouldn't let me run certain commands.

Long story short, I gave up, formatted both drives & started over. 6 hours & 8 cups of coffee later, I'm essentially back to where I started. xD

Shame I didn't get here before you tried, I was gonna say I don't think you can do that. All OS's need to be installed on the same drive as the MBR, I don't think you can install windows on one HDD then linux on another.



Above is my partition table, I installed the main OS's on the SSD (sda) then format all hard drives to ext4 to use for storage, except sdb1 which is a 100GB ntfs partition for windows.

Trying to hack with Kali? Lol

Can you not install it via USB onto HDD B? You can install GRUB, but usually has to be on the MBR, but you'll be able to boot Windows still.

No. Kali happens to be my favorite Linux distribution, along with Fedora & Ubuntu. Besides, the tool set included with Kali is for penetration testing. While you could use it for unethical purposes, it is predominantly for security testing. And, being a man who likes to keep his shit safe from other people, it's fairly ideal.



It's all good, I've finally managed to sort it out. Well, by sorting it out I just installed it on a different computer. No big deal. But what you said is what I did, however no matter what I did, Grub didn't want to accept that Windows was installed on HDD A. I guess it was just a bit of a random, out of no where issue, but none-the-less it's kind of sorted now.