Linux and Windows on T420s

[9rhansen]

Hello, I am a new poster to these forums, though I have read quite a bit. I am a little confused about dual booting. I have a t420s laptop with 320 gb HDD and windows 7. I am thinking about getting a 32gb mSATA sdd.

I want to install linux to the sdd, and keep windows 7 on the hdd (i need it for certain applications). Can I do this, and when booting up, choose between running either Linux (from the sdd) or Windows (from the hdd)? If so, will I be able to access files on the hdd while i am running Linux from the sdd? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: Sorry, I should have looked more. After a quick google search it appears accessing windows files from linux is pretty simple. I am still not sure if/how i can choose between the 2 os at startup though.

[Cigarguy]

Dual booting should be no problem. Install Win 7 first then install Linux. Most Linus distro come with GRUB which will set up the dual booting option. When you've settle on a distro do some reading on how to dual boot with that distro. All of the major distro will have a writeup on dual booting with Windows. I've had no problem reading and writing Windows NTFS files.

[farmall]

Thinkpads offer a MUCH better way than fornicating with bootloaders, so I take advantage of it.

Do a clean install on each drive with the other drive disconnected. Select drive on boot! Bonus is you can reload either drive without disturbing the other drives boot record, and you won't be one of the folks posting after hosing their boot record.

F12 does it for me.

You can read your Windows drive from your Linux drive with no problem.