If the linux Mint 13 partition of the hard drive is corrupted, and I decide to give up on recovering my files on there, and want to just replace it with Linux 15, would anyone be willing to give me instructions for linux dummies to do so? My preference would be to do as much from the terminal emulator as possible. I really want to learn how to work from there as much as possible.
You guys are all great. Very nice of you to take your time to help out newbies.

If you have important data on the disk you can always try to salvage it with "testdisk". But do read the manual for it before doing it, it can be somewhat complicated, depending entirely on the situation you are on.


Anyways... For Linux Mint 15.
Have a clear plan before you install it!

I always have a seperate /home partition for example which is generally a good idea. Also, getting a good idea of what /home is relative to coming from a Windows environment, makes it easy to back up all your important data. Understanding how filesystems and partitioning works in GNU/Linux makes it easy to install the same or another distro without ever needing to change the /home partition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesys...archy_Standard
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesy...ierarchy/html/


I have some simple rules for myself in regards to installing GNU/Linux:
-Always install Grub on the MBR.
-Always have a backup of important data!!
-ALWAYS use "custom disk partitioning" when installing a distro
-Use MD5 or other checksums to verify that the content of your distro install CD is not corrupted
-Never install if you are too tired or don't have time to properly install and set up everything / don't do a sloppy install
-Choose the right distro for the intended use
-Get rid of Windows if you can, or put it in Virtualbox
-If you must have Windows installed seperately, always create a FAT32 partition to move data between GNU/Linux and Windows
-Never panick during installation! Never not choose the default option for something you don't fully know what is or how it works.



If you follow the above rules, you should be fine. Ooh.. And personally I would recommend you go for Linux Mint KDE version. The desktop is much richer and easier to use than Gnome/Mate.

Also.

Create
/ partition of at least 50GB, best more than 100GB
/home partition of as much as you can spare
/mnt/somename fat32 partition of at least 10GB to move data between OS

Save some space on the disk, leave an empty partition for other purposes (20GB). Maybe you find out you want to try another distro as well?

I've given up on saving the files, saved and extracted a linux mint 13 32 bit iso file on a new 8GB usb flashdrive, formatted as fat32.
I cannot get the computer to boot from this usb drive as a "live" drive, with the hope of transfering that os onto the hard drive partition that used to have my old (now corrupted) linux mint 13 os on it. I can boot up with a different live usb drive w/ linux mint 14 on it, and can then mount the 8 gb usb drive and see the linux mint 13 iso on it, and the extracted file. Is there any command that I can type in on the terminal to install the mint 13 os from the 8 gb usb drive to the corrupted partition on the hard drive of the laptop, all while running on the linux mint 14 os from the first live usb drive?