My machine is set up as follows:

• /dev/sda (i.e. "disk1") - 500GB SSD with my production OS environment on it


• /dev/sdb (i.e. "disk2") - a 250GB ssd that I use for storing data files


• /dev/sdc (i.e. "disk3") - a 16GB m.sata drive that I only recently found out was installed on my machine, but appears to be a reasonably high performance device (i.e. suitable to run an OS and lightweight apps)

What I'd like to do is install Ubuntu on the 16GB drive so that I can boot into it when needed, but primarily use the /dev/sda operating system.

I do NOT want to touch the bootloader on /dev/sda. I do NOT need to be able to select the boot device from GRUB or a windows bootloader. I'm perfectly willing to do an explicit boot device selection from BIOS to choose when I need to boot into the Ubuntu OS on the 16G drive. I should actually consider this a requirement, as at some point I will likely need to move one or both of these devices to another machine and I want them to appear as standalone devices, each with their native bootloaders and no knowledge of the "other" OS installed on that machine.

I've tried stepping through the Ubuntu installation program, but it's not clear to me how I could do this (both selecting the destination device for the install and ONLY installing grub on that device). Anyone have suggestions on how this might work? I found a suggestion that was basically "take the other disks out, install, and then reinstall the disks" but that's not only pretty un-elegant, it's a real pain for me to take this particular machine (laptop) apart to get to the physical drives.