I have an asus tuf a17 installed exactly as you wanted to… my first drive is dedicated to windows, my second drive is partitioned with a 50gb root partition, 250gb home partition and a 700gb sharable data partition.
At boot, as soon as you power on, Press and hold f2. This will load the bios. Press f7 for advanced. Go to the boot section. The top of the page has fast boot. Disable it. At the lower part of the page click secure boot, then change from enabled to disabled. May be under security. F10 to save and exit. After installation you can re-enable them. Secure boot is for the drivers, has nothing to do with you or you’re data.
Go back into windows. That hard drive you want to install Linux on, wipe it, no file system, or fat32. In the something else part of install you’ll have less confusion because you will know if it’s not ntfs it’s the right drive. You’ll be selecting that one partition and changing the size. Select that fat partition and choose change… at the top of the change window will be the size in megabytes[MB]. You’ll want at least a 30 gigabyte[GB] partition for root… no more than 50. To get the MB multiply the number you want by 1024…(ex. 30 x 1024 = 30,720) and that’s the number you put in. Choose format, choose mount position as /.
Now you have unallocated space. If you select that and hit change you can use the entire thing (i recommend a 20GB data partition you can see in windows to help with downloads for Linux) so whatever size allows that extra for a data partition[windows can’t see or interact with Linux partitions]. This one also gets formatted as ext4 and mounted at /home.
[OPTIONAL]
The last partition is so you can download things you’ll need to get everything working… same thing. Select unallocated space, this time format as NTFS (i know it says Journaling file system, ignore that tidbit and choose NTFS). Mount it at
/home/data
You will have to type it in. Click ok, then install grub to the other drive. This will allow grub to see both systems and offer your choices. It will also take the place of windows boot manager. If you don’t windows will fight with grub and you most likely won’t be able to boot.
Took me since before christmas last year to get it right. I finally have zorin situated on my a17.
Rufus is the best for formatting quickly and creating bootable drives (free to).
Let me know when you’re set up that far and I’ll help you get what else you’ll need to make everything work as it should. Btw, expect your wifi to not work. Bluetooth does though… can Bluetooth tether to get the firmware to fix that… but that’s for a later time.