Hm. I recently upgraded my PC, and now I have a spare 320gb HDD in my rig because I upgraded to a 1TB drive. I'm thinking of formatting the old HDD and installing Ubuntu on it. Are there any tutorials around to help a total Linux noob like me?

first get it on

ubuntu.com

then use google if you have any problems 

replying so that I can come back to this topic later :)

stopped using Ubuntu since 8.04 and has been thinking about giving it a try again.

On a related topic, is there any other new linux distro worth checking out lately?

Just put the HDD into your rig, put in the Ubuntu LiveCD or LiveUSB, and baaam there's your tutorial. Seriously, the install process is extremely simple. It'll ask you simple stuff like what kind of keyboard layout you use, what time zone you're in, etc. It'll also ask you about stuff like, what do you want your user name to be? Password?

The only remotely technical part is where it'll ask you where you want to install Ubuntu to. Just pick the 320 GB HDD then. It's really extremely, extremely simple and takes at most 30 minutes.

My friend swears by OpenSuse. Fedora's a good one, you can kind of think of it as the desktop version of RedHat. Another popular on is Linux Mint, which is based off Ubuntu, but comes with certain things set up that the Mint people feel most people want.

It'll even prompt me about which HDD to use?  I won't have to change it to read the 320gb'er first via the BIOS or anything?

It'll ask you how you want to choose your partitions, at which point you can choose the 320 gb drive. As for which one to load, Ubuntu uses a boot loader called GRUB. If you have multiple OS's, on start up GRUB will ask you which one you want to boot into, so you can choose between, say, Windows and Ubuntu or whatever else you have on there.

Now that is awesome.

Yes, yes it is.

Yeah, I always look for complications, partitioning both disks for both OS', but if you keep each OS on a different disk it's really very simple.

You can also access FAT and NTFS Windows partitions from Linux, so data exchange between them is easy. You can even access the same Firefox and Thunderbird accounts from both OS', if you keep the accounts on a Windows partition.