System has two hard disks: 160GB SSD, which is the boot disk and 500GB RAID1 HDD.
I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit installed as the main OS on the SSD. I don't want to touch or modify this drive.
The 500GB RAID1 drive had one partition: 1 primary NTFS partition for storage of stuff I want to access from Windows, and then about 200GB of unallocated space.
I ran the 11.10 installer, selected the "just install the stuff" option (the first one, I forget what it's called), and it installed it in the unallocated space, creating two primary partitions: one ~200GB ext4 partition for Ubuntu itself and another 12GB primary partition for the swap file (same size as RAM I have).
Problem is that Grub didn't install to the MBR on the boot disk (the SSD) so I have no way of starting Ubuntu that doesn't involve BIOS shenanigans. I am kind of apprehensive about manually installing Grub into the MBR of the boot disk myself so any guidance regarding if that's even what I need to do would be great.
FYI, I tried re-installing specifying everything manually, including setting the ~200GB ext4 partition to be the / mount point and telling the installer to install the bootloader on /dev/sda1 (I think, perhaps is was /dev/sda, I forget, exactly), and that didn't work, either.
Best Answer
I recommend you install GRUB into the Master Boot Record of the second hard disk you are installing Ubuntu on and configure your bios to boot that hard drive first, GRUB will detect your Windows install on the SSD and include it allowing you to choose either operating system on start up.
When you install ubuntu ensure you select
/dev/sdbas the destination for GRUB.