Thinking about Dual Booting

in short: yes.

in not so short: You'll need to create a separate partition on your HDD, and install linux to that one instead, and then during startup, change some bios settings, so you're allowed to choose which partition to boot from every time you start up the computer. If you need more detailed steps, i'm sure a quick google search will reward you with plenty of tutorials.

Yes, it is, but you need to resize your partitions, if you dont have enough free space left.

Different bootloader most likely, though some distros detect your windows installation and boot it perfectly fine. (Debian at least seems to, im running this with win7).

Also, if you have UEFI, you might be able to still just boot the regular windows bootloader directly, or linux (grub), but that might depend on the uefi implementation.

In case of doubt, read tutorials beforehand, print them out in case something goes wrong, or have a second machine ready to troubleshoot.

Generally, its better to really read stuff before you try it, because if you install your linux wrong, your windows will be gone.
[Edit: How do i format stuff on here.. lol]

It is possible to dual boot from a single HDD, and I have done it with Ubuntu 9.10 before. Good old times there. For steps, it's pretty much explained by the first post already, so I won't cover that.

As for different bootloaders, those are not required, but could be used if you want to and/or are lazy to switch back to the Windows one.

as far as i remember it was always easier to install Ubuntu in adition to windows because windows somehow tend to override loaders when installed as second OS and act like the only OS on the disc

• there is a lot of trouble with UEFI booting, if you know what I mean. +make sure your video card is NOT ATI-AMD + there is such thing called "Wine" that lets you play windows games inside Linux.

Dont bother. You can safe try linux from live dvd, if you try to install it without knowing what you're doing you will lose everything on hdd

For games : Install playonlinux, it provides some tools to make your life easier.
Also Youtube is a great place to check compatibility of games on linux Just type: Running (game name) on Linux.

I maybe wrong but doesn't the WUBI.exe installer permit installation (since 5 years) of Ubuntu on the same partition as a folder on the original C: NTFS drive ?

As for installation i'd recommend installing to a USB key if you want to initiate yourself before trying on your computer.

on a single HDD, yes.

I dual boot ubuntu 14 along side windows on my laptop, I'm pretty sure the ubuntu installation set up the GRUB bootloader automatically which detected the native OS (windows in this case)

Ubuntu has really good documentation on how to do dual boot Ubuntu alongside another OS

Depending on your actual plans with Linux, you may want to try installing one to VirtualBox first.

Thanks for all the help guys, going to install it later when I get a writeable DVD by following ubuntu's own guide! :)

Just Installed ubuntu and was surprised how easy the installer made it, all seems to be just fine.

I can't figure out how to install the AMD driver. really giving me a headache now.

You can't brick your computer.

Well why would you want to walk around in just one boot anyway?

Yes, you can dual boot from a single HDD.

First, you need to make sure you have plenty of space free, because you're going to partition the drive, creating another partition for Linux or whatever you're using.

Linux is pretty easy to install, and there's pretty simple step by step instruction on the Ubuntu website, for example. Basically, you burn the image to a flash drive or CD/DVD then boot from that, then choose to install into the new partition you've made.

You'll likely need a new bootloader (GRUB is standard with Ubuntu, I believe) and you'll have to choose which partition to install this on, so you can choose to boot into either Windows or Linux when you start.

Good luck, don't wipe your HDD. Make backups!

just one more thing: while it's easy to dual boot from one single hdd, multi booting doesn't scale linearly. for instance triple booting xp, 7 and linux can be a real headache, since it's easy to mess with drivers and bootloaders. easybcd and using separate hdd was useful in my experience. still, probably it's not your case.

You can always try to install it on a virtual drive with some virtual machine, just reserve 20 GB and you'll be ok. You could also use some live distributions that has capabilities to save&edit files on/from your HDD or a flash drive.