First off, does the Linux drive need to be partitioned in any way before the install?

No, Linux installs usually involve a partitioning program. Mandrakes certainly does, and it's quite user friendly.

And secondly, when I am going through the install for Mandrake will it give me the choice to install on this (second) empty drive?

Yes. it will refer to the first drive as "hda", second drive as "hdb". You'll know which one is which, cos one of them will be unpartitioned!

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give for my questions above, and I'd appreciate any 'pointers' anyone could give that will help me prepare and get through this install!

Don't use the autopartition function in Mandrake. I say that as a 'just in case' scenario. Typically you will only need 2 partitions:- root (/) and swap. Make swap 2x the size of your RAM (as a typical value). If you lack diskspace, 2 partitions is probably safest.

Personally, I prefer to partition like this for a home computer:- /usr =large /home =very large /swap = 2x amount of RAM / = large-ish, (about 1.5 gig is plenty)

Reasons: most new applications you install are in /usr, most data is in /home. If the worst comes to the worst and you need to reinstall, you can just 'borrow' the /usr and /home partitions, so no data lost.

Ricardo