Partitioning a physical drive for multi system install

Hello!

Due to the fact of my fight with setting up my laptop with one system on the internal drive and the second one in a caddy and poor results an idea came to me this evening.

Maybe I could partition the internal drive with GParted for lets say 2 or 3 partitions and install 2 or 3 separate systems on them?

The only questions is if those systems would be strictly separated?

Could I set it up like this:

  • one partition encrypted (I need it for my work)
  • one partition normal without encryption
  • one partition normal or encrypted

Would Grub allow me to easily boot those without problems like with the caddy setup (You can read about my adventures here: Ubuntu Mate on laptop take two)?

Would the encrypted partition/install be completely isolated form the other ones? I would keep ther my clients data, and other stuff related to my job, company mail etc.