Second HDD after installation (for bios boot)

[Diggory]

Oldfred - thanks again

I dont think I created an encrypted partition - not sure there is an option for this.
I have downloaded GParted - could I have used this from UBUNTU to create the NTFS partition.

Re the disk management tools - sounds like you think the NTFS is a bit of a faff.
I was wondering about this, even if I had files on my data partition and the UBUNTU system went down, I could still copy files to my old Windows NTFS disk using live CD.

If i was to re-format this (data) partition as Ext from GParted what mount point would i give it.

Thanks D

[oldfred]

I used NTFS after losing some data on FAT32 as it does not support large files. I used it for sharing data with my XP install which I now use very rarely (managed not to boot my desktop XP this years yet). But I cheated and booted my laptop's XP a couple of times.

If you have Windows you need the NTFS, but once you convert to Linux, having a Windows format partition can be a hassle. It just is not easy to convert (backup & restore, & set permission & ownership) so I still have data in my NTFS partition.

I have only used gparted for the last 6 years, including fat32 & NTFS partitions. Some have reported some issues with NTFS and Windows 7 where they had to reformat to NTFS from Windows 7. The boot sector for NTFS has several versions, one for XP, one for Vista/7 and possibly others. Gparted's seems to be the XP version but 7 normally just works with it or converts it if necessary.