Your GParted image looks like you have more than one drive. If you have only one hard drive, it appears you have overwritten your winsows installation. If you have multiple drives, you may still have windows.
Quote:
Windows 7, which did not appear to be recognized by the Mint 16 installer
|
That doesn't look good, would have been a good time to stop the install. Which option did you select for the Installation Type? Something Else is usually the best if you have another OS on the system as you can see what is happening and make choices.
Quote:
although Mint was residing on /dev/sda6 it now appears to reside on /dev/sda1, and shows about 490GB free out of my HDD's 500GB
|
Actually your GParted output shows 1.02MB unallocated/free space and your Mint partition formatted ext4 is 457GB. If you don't have backups of your data, you could have serious problems recovering it. You might be able to recover data using TestDisk. Just do an online search to get the download site.