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Seeking help on how partitions will work when dual-booting.
I plan on dual-booting Linux soon, and I am wondering on how to handle partitions. I have 3 drives in my computer: an SSD that Windows 10 boots from, a second SSD with one partition and some unallocated space intended for Linux, and an HDD.
When I install Linux on that SSD, how can I prevent Windows from messing with the Linux partition and vice-versa? Can Linux and Windows both read and write to the HDD partitions without complaining about the other modifying them?
If they're separate drives then you configure this mainly at boot, that is the simpler scenario. The bios or UEFI will let you configure boot drive order, you don't have to think about partitions.
Linux and Windows can coexist without issues in a setup like this but they won't necessarily be aware of each other so if you want a boot menu that lets you pick Windows or Linux, you will probably have to install it yourself. GRUB should be able to handle it. Otherwise you'd have to get to the boot drive menu every time you want to get to a different OS.
It's pretty simple. No need to worry. Operating systems can always see every partition and storage device in a computer, but they can only 'talk to' partitions that have specific filesystems. Windows uses ntfs, and also has support for the FAT filesystems commonly used on flash drives and sd cards. Linux, by default (for almost every distro) uses ext4. Windows cannot talk to ext4 at all. Luckily, Windows just ignores devices it cannot talk to (although you will still see the partition in disk utilities). Linux has support for ntfs. Most distros will install it by default, or have a simple setting you have to enable. That will allow you to read and write your Windows formatted partitions on Linux. (Make sure to check a recent tutorial about dual booting Windows and Linux. Windows by default does some weird stuff that you have to disable.) So, with this fully setup, you will be able to use all your partitions from Linux, and all partitions except the Linux partition from Windows. Simply put any files you need in both os on an ntfs partition and you are good to go.