I have 3 hard drives in my system. C Drive(main drive), D Drive(storage only) & G Drive(Blank now, but ready for Linux). E & F are my Optical Drives. Im Mepis, they refer to drives hda, hde & hdf as the drives I can use to install Mepis. How do I correspond these letters with my C, D & G drives? Note: In my Bios they are noted as HDD0 thru HDD3.

In linux, the drives work like this:

Primary IDE Channel, Master : hda
Primary IDE Channel, Slave : hdb
Secondary IDE Channel, Master : hdc
Secondary IDE Channel, Slave : hdd

so it depends on how you have your drives attached, really
partition in linux correspond to the drives, hda1, hda2, hda3, hdb1, hdb2; would be three partitions on hda and two partitions on hdb. free space doesn't get a number like a partition does, it is just "there" until you do something with it.

OK hollywoodb. Then if my G Drive is the 3rd Master in my group, is it safe to assume that it would be the "hde" drive in Mepis? I appreciate your quick response. Thanks again.

It should be... to be safe you could try mounting the drive from the livecd to make sure it is the drive you think it is, for example:

If it fails to mount with unknown filesystem or similar, it is probably the right drive as it is probably blank. If it mounts, do:

to show the contents of the drive an then unmount it.

OK hollywoodb, you just went over my head with the Code. I absolutely have no clue as to what you wrote and where I am suppose to write this or what program to use to write it in. Talk about a Neebie, thats me. Where can you direct me to make sense of this?

Your info says you're using SimplyMepis, so you should be able to do:

Alt+F2 -> type 'konsole' -> Run

Then you should be able to run those commands, if it says permission denied, then do "su -" first.

Alternatively, you could point Konqueror to "system:/media" and see if the hard drives are listed there so you can look at them and make sure you're looking at the right one.

I guess I didn't make myself clear. I was asking the original question because I have yet to install Mepis on my computer. I have never installed it or used it. I mean, I am really starting out new. I appreciate your responses and I will eventually "get it". It's people like you that make this easier on newbies like me. Thanks again.

Ok, SimplyMepis is a LiveCD. Boot your system with it. The commands (not code) given to you are shell commands. You use them in a terminal.

Linux does use a much different naming scheme than Windows. You will get used to it.

Boot the LiveCD and then just take a look at the available drives to see what is on them. It shouldn't be too hard to find the blank one.

If you start the partitioner, I believe that Mepis uses QTParted, use it to see what file systems are listed for each drive. When you find the blank unformatted one that's the one you want.

LQ uses "Code:" blocks to render text in a monospace font in a box. It is usually for shell commands (think DOS-box if your experience goes back that far), not just some arcane computer language. Actually shell commands will seem arcane at 1st, but (we hope) you will get used to them .

In my experience installing Linux on perhaps hundreds of computers for new users, the SimplyMEPIS installer is the easiest, simplest, clearest one I have seen yet.