Explain dual booting and installing on another internal hard drive?

Question

Can somebody explain the difference between dual booting ubuntu 14.04 and windows 8, and installing ubuntu on another internal hard drive? And how you would do this? I'm a relatively new ubuntu user but I really love it, but I also want to be able to play games so I want to have both windows 8 and ubuntu 14.04 running without a drag on my computer. I see some websites that recommend dual booting for this, and others that say this will mess up my computer and should install ubuntu on another internal hard drive instead. This is making my head explode.

Answer 1

Simple: There is none ;-) Dual-Booting just means that you will on boot up (after the power button is pressed and BIOS shows POST messages) NOT immediately be greeted by an Operating system as you have two installed. Instead you will be given the option to chose which one to start (Actually you can even dual-boot without that menu but let's ignore that for a second).

Basically an OS is installed on one (or more) partition(s) on physical drive(s) of your computer. Roughly speaking it creates a special section on the disk which is the either the Master Boot Record (MBR) on BIOS Systems or an ESP partition on EFI systems where it installs the boot-loader. Either way these are small bootable files which launch the appropriate operating system.

Also this software (on Ubuntu most likely GRUB) will provide your "chose OS to start" menu. It can detect other installed OS's like other Linux distributions or Windows (actually it chainloads the windows bootloader but that's just a side-note).

To setup your PC like this install one OS first (beginning with Windows is recommended) and then the second. Assuming the second is Ubuntu you just select "install alongside Windows" in the installer and it will find unallocated space on a system to assign to Ubuntu. Also it will install a boot-loader as formerly mentioned and will instruct it to search for a Windows install. It should detect it automatically. On booting you can select which OS to start.

Bottom-Line: There's no real difference and Ubuntu should do a good job with guiding you through the process.