dual hd and other misc questions

[Bizarro]

I have decided to install Linux on my machine and I am going to go with gentoo and I have a few questions before I go ahead and start. I have two hard drives one with windows and all my files on it and a second with nothing on it becuase my first hd is far too large to begin with. Anyway I'm thinking about installing linux on the 2nd hard drive but I'm not sure how the boot process will then work. I read somewhere that it would require me to install some kind of boot manager on the primary drive so I would be able to select which OS to load, rather than going into the bios each time. Another question i have is about whether or not I will be able to access my files on my primary drive from my linux drive. That is essentially what I want to be able to do...if possible at all. Oh and I have a wireless bluetooth mouse and keyboard...are there any problems with using them during install, or would I need to plug in wired ones until I can setup some drivers and such
Thanks

[tvilkov]

Hey,
I'm not a linux genius, but I have read about some of the things you're interested in. If you have two hdd's, then yes, you install linux bootloader onto the primary hdd (where your windows are). It's called GRUB. You must install the linux bootloader (there's no choice) on there. Or, why don't you make it easier and just install linux onto the windows hdd? It'll be much easier. Anyways, I suggest still doing some research on it!
About reading the other drive... in linux you'll have to mount it as a media device or something like that (don't ask me how to do it in gentoo... you'll probably have to do it manually). To access the other files, you'll have to have progs that can read ntfs or fat32, if the other hdd is formatted as such.
If you're new to linux, why don't you try some other distro? I've heard its quite hard to install gentoo properly, plus in most popular distros most things are done automatically for you, like mounting devs.
I'm not sure about the wireless things, but find out on google.
Hope this helps! Good luck