To be clear, the person asked about adding a "new hard drive," NOT "a new, FIXED hard drive."
So, yes, go get an $80, 1TB USB external HD. Power it up, hook up the USB cable; DONE.
AND, I definitely have problems with these cr@ppy statements about, "If you have multiple hard drives, remove all of them except the one to which you are installing the o/s."
That is WASTEFUL, time-consuming and unnecessary. I have never had any problems having multiple hard drives in the system when installing a new o/s.
And it NEVER should be necessary to "jump through such hoops;" i.e., 'removing' any additional hard drives. Does that include external USB drives? Thumb drives? Seriously, MOST OF THE TIME, people will be installing more and more from thumb and external USB
drives.
I know that I do my Windows Server 2008 R2 installs from thumb drive. ANY good disk management utility, including DELL and HP raid utilities (Open Manage, for example), DO NOT CARE if you have a zillion hard drives in your system or in your RAID enclosure
- as long as you partition them to your own purposes.
And I think, to answer your question, that installing the boot code on the same partition as the o/s is okay - IF I understand correctly - i.e., you don't need a separate partition just to act as a 'boot manager,' but I could be wrong; i.e., if you 'chose'
to put the boot code on C: [and] the o/s on C:, then won't it use the same 'boot manager' features as if you had the separate 100MB partition?