Hi,

I posted this yesterday and as it hasn't appeared I wondered if it sent properly. If this ends up being a duplicate post I apologise.

I have the intention of shifting over (entirely) to linux from windows 7 because my Windows serial key thinks it wants to in a day's time! I'm trying to partition, but I'm getting lots of "unknown" space I can't press the "-" button on, that's a lot of unknown GBs I have an unusual system that shows at least 3 drives, and on a windows file search tool I have it shows 4: In windows terms,

Local Disk (C - Total size 931 GB
New Volume E The drive from my old PC -232 G b
Local Disk F 40 GB
Local disk G 192 GB

I'd like to make the most of all space for my files and all functions. Lots of unknown space is a bit confusing? I've taken tried taking a snap of my screen - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3v...ew?usp=sharing - it's not a photographic masterpiece!

Any help would be greatly appreiciated, as I'm a total newbie!
All the best,
Peter

Do you really need to slice this drive into pieces? I'd use the whole drive for / and that's it, no separate /home or anything else.

OK, I did wonder, that certanly would be easier. I've been trying to follow youtube tutorials which are rather slicey-dicey, Can I easily partition after the fact if I decide otherwise? I've hot multible physical harddrives - will I still be able to use them?

Yes you can use additional hard drives, you can even move your /home to another HDD later if you wish.

You tube isn't the best source of information since anyone can post a tutorial on it and you have no idea as to it's accuracy. Your image shows you are using some version of Linux Mint which is a very commonly used distribution of Linux. The link below is to the Linux Mint site with Manuals you can download for whichever release of Mint you have.

https://www.linuxmint.com/documentation.php

When posting here, the first piece of information you should provide is which of the 500+ distributions of Linux you are using and which version release.

Your image shows you are using LVM. Do you know what LVM is? If you don't, you probably shouldn't use it. LVM is not the default type of install for a home user but there are good reasons to use it. If you look at most tutorials, they won't be using LVM so if you plan to use it, make sure you get correct info.

The 'unknown' you refer to is under the 'Size' column so if there is nothing on the partition that might explain it. You show sda1 as the separate /home partition of 254MB. That's useless, much to small. You also show another /home partition on sdb1. You should not have two /home partitions if you are only installing one system.

You might take a look at the basic tutorial at the Mint site below.

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=122276