My first post to access this site.
 

So here it goes.
This question has been asked countless times before I am sure but I need to post in order to begin looking up. I do things for myself if at all possible.
Short version is I have no idea what I am doing. That has never stopped me before.
My company is (work here not owner) is being eaten by a bigger fish who are not fans of the ittybittysquishey. So I am going to learn Linux. Don't know what distro so I am approaching this the same way I began learning Windows 3.1 back when my country were mere colonies. So I need first to navigate the BASH the same way I learned dos.
If I were to have two partitions in windows C:\ and D:\ on the same hard drive I would have sda1 and sda2 (solid state drives youbetcha) I can dir D:\ from c:\ but I can't seem to ls -l sda2 from root whilst on mounted sda1. These are the type of questions I have and will have. Any suggestions as where to start this learning process in short order? There seem to be an overwhelming number of resources and I have limited time to do this. Kids and a life tend to get in the way.
Looking forward to getting to know this site real well.

sda1 refers to the partition on a block device. in daily use of a system you would never refer to that, just the filesystem. The use of "C:" in dos / windows is an excellent example of pointless arbitrary windows conventions becoming not only accepted by taken to be good things. What on earth does "C:" mean?? how many users these days even knew what A: and B: are / were?

Under unix, all partitions are attached to a single filesystem tree. files living on sda1 may be accessible at /home whilst files on sda2 could be just at /. It doesn't matter to the operating system or the end user what lives where, just that the files are there and ready to use. so you'd never do "ls -l sda1", it doesn't work like that.

BTW, you did not need to post anythign if you didn't want to, that's only to stop people posting URL's on their first post.

In Windows, any disk partition gets its own drive letter, whether it's a different physical device, or if it's merely a partition on the same device. Windows is stupid like that.

Linux improves on the process by giving you a way to tell the two apart. When you attach a physical hard drive, it'll be recognized as /dev/sda. A second one would become /dev/sdb. And so on.

Each partition on each device would get a partition number. So the first partition on /dev/sda would be /dev/sda1, then /dev/sda2, /dev/sda3, etc. The same pattern applies when you format and then partition /dev/sdb.

Once you've completed the process of formatting/partitioning your disks, you then mount them. Each partition is a filesystem, and each filesystem gets mounted somewhere along the directory tree. You pick where.

The top-level directory is root (/), and /dev/sda1 will always mount there. Typically, /dev/sda2 is your swap filesystem, so you won't go browsing that, since it's a different filesystem type altogether. The next one to mount would be /dev/sda3. You'll pick a mount point somewhere along the directory tree (someplace empty, or else you'll end up making the files under it inaccessible... sometimes that's a good idea, usually it's not what you want, though). When you want to do an ls -l of that filesystem, you do it to the mount point.

For example, if we mount /dev/sda3 at /var, then the way to browse the contents of /dev/sda3 would be:

Or just:

Here are three good references for starters:

http://linux.about.com/. It's oriented to Ubuntu, but it's full of good info.

http://tille.garrels.be/training/tldp/. Machtelt Garrels Intro to Linux.

http://www.slackbook.org/. Slackware oriented, but excellent on the basics, such as file structure, permissions, and the like.

Good tutorial
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

This a is good short read http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm; covers basic differences between MSWin and Linux

Or use a graphical way to view partitions like gparted.

Thank you all for the direction. The Windows/Linux transition is a little difficult having limited time but I believe this new hobby is going to be more fun than work.