sda is the terabyte disk. It appears that you have one small boot partition on there and no other file systems.

sdb appears to be about 20G where about half of that is used.

You are running, your root file system (RFS) is located on this sdb drive which has the free space you're reporting.

You did not therefore install Linux where you intended to install it. However, you can keep the install as is and then choose to map the entire sda drive to be your /home partition, and therefore be the data for your user account.

If I can get Linux going on that computer, I will eventually install it on all 5 of my machines.

is there a guide for how to do that?

Exactly how did you get this information?t

Looking at your fdisk output it shows that you have an EFI partition (sda1, 512MB), another small partition (sda2 488MB) and not sure what that is, boot partition? You then show sda3 as 930GB. Add those up and you get 931GB which is the size of the drive Did you boot and install Mint EFI? Can you use your install usb and mount sda1 to check whether you have any Mint efi files on that partition?

Create the Mount point: sudo mkdir /mnt/sda1 (hit the Enter key)
Mount the partition: sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1 (hit the Enter key)

Open whichever file manager you use and navigate to /mnt/sda1 and look for either a Mint or Ubuntu directory. I'm not sure what you would see as I don't use Mint but as it is an Ubuntu derivative the folder might be named ubuntu. If you don't see any Mint/Ubuntu directory, you probably installed MBR rather than UEFI. Check boot options in the BIOS to see if you have a Legacy boot option and it is enabled. That might be it.

You might watch on boot for a special key to hit to get boot options to see if you have an entry for Mint which you can boot.

If this doesn't help, you might need to get the boot repair software from the link below and download it while booted to the Mint usb and run it. Make sure you just select the option to Create BootInfo Summary and post the link here.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

Try this https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=110433, and note, untried by myself. It may be worth your while to search for Mint instructions to move your /home partition, that's really how I found that.

i wish knew more about command prompts and such. I am a bit out of my depth with just basic knowledge of computers..and what i do know is from Windows. I will try these options you have given me, and if all else fails, I can reinstall it. I do not plan on reinstalling Windows

does it make a difference that this is a touch screen computer?

sdb is a small SSD drive. You've basically installed Mint (the whole operating system, including your /home data partition) to your SSD drive which is why you have so little space left.

If you are unsure about how to follow rtmistler's advice, you need to reinstall but, when given the choice, install / (root) to the smaller SSD and /home and swap to the larger HDD hard drive. You should see a drop-down on the installer that allows you to determine which of the drives you install the various partitions to.

I think they are just using the file manager to inform them that there is a certain amount of free space left, however from these data they posted:It would seem that they are running off of an SSD of about 24G in size, they are running from a 14G partition on that drive, and 5.7G is used, leaving about 7.5G remaining, or whatever the math works out too, those numbers appear close.

hydruga

I am reinstalling it. I had tried the HDD drive first and got an error message stating it could not install. So second time around, I selected the only other option. I will try again and hopefully get it right this time

it is going through the process a lot faster than it did before and i did not get the error message again. can someone tell me what the smaller drive is for and if i did irreparable damage to it?

Many computers have a large HDD and a smaller, faster SSD. The general idea is you use the SSD for the operating system, and the HDD for data storage.

The second smaller drive is a much faster solid state drive (SSD). It allows faster boot times if you use it for booting your system, among other things. In effect, you have what is called a "hybrid" system with both the SSD and the larger not-so-fast HDD (hard disk drive). An SSD is generally more expensive than an HDD for the same storage capacity, which is why hybrid systems exist - the benefits of an SSD and the cheaper cost of an HDD. No you didn't do any damage.

Once the process is finished, can you run sudo df -h again and paste the output here. Thanks.

ash@ash-SVT15115CXS ~ $ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 787M 9.4M 777M 2% /run
/dev/mapper/mint--vg-root 909G 5.5G 857G 1% /
tmpfs 3.9G 33M 3.9G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 3.9G 0 3.9G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda2 473M 62M 387M 14% /boot
/dev/sda1 511M 3.6M 508M 1% /boot/efi
cgmfs 100K 0 100K 0% /run/cgmanager/fs
tmpfs 787M 24K 787M 1% /run/user/1000
ash@ash-SVT15115CXS ~ $

I want to thank everyone who helped me today. I now have over 900gigs! Thank you all for your patience and time in dealing with someone who has no idea what she is doing!