Question about putting Linux on external hard drive

[Travis]

Heard about Bitcoin like a week ago, have been doing some reading since then. Still slightly skeptical, but I think I'll bite, I've been tempted and just plain like the ideas behind
Bitcoin.

So I thought I would do it the right way from the beginning and follow the advice of a thread here and keep all my Bitcoin files on a separate Linux OS. I'm completely new to Linux, but I'm going with Ubuntu, how different could it be?

I think I know how to install it just fine on my external hard drive following these directions, but I have  a couple questions... I already use that external hard drive to hold backups of a bunch of files, music, movies, etc. If I want to put Linux on that hard drive, will doing so delete/overwrite all those files? If so, can I put Linux on that hard drive, and then move all those files back over to it? Its 500 gigs, so I want to keep my Linux OS on it and all my files so I can access them on other operating systems. Can I do that?

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[Travis]

Bump... Going to repost this in technical support if no one answers here.. Can't trust that anyone will see it here.

[hugolp]

It would be better if you could temporarely move your files to somewhere else and then install Ubuntu and copy them back, but you can probably install Ubuntu in just a part of the hard drive if that is what you want. The Ubuntu isntallation will offer you that option.

What you might want to do is buy a USB device of at least 4Gb and install Ubuntu on that USB.

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