Lots of questions about linux.

I am about 2 months new to Linux, and have only limited experience with PCLinuxOS, (kde) and Redhat.

I am installing the latest version of PClinuxOS on my wife's PC right now but running into a problem I dont understand. I have never seen it before so i thought i'd ask how I can get around it.

When I get into Root on live CD and double click on the "install PCLinuxOS" icon it goes through the first 2 screens letting me select either a USB HD, or a Normal Hard Drive (ide, sata) (I have 2 sata harddrives in there with windows XP on them, when I installed windows xp i partitioned them to be one 80gig HD.) When I click next after selecting "normal Hard Drive" it says "I can not find room for installing" and quits.

when I click on my computer and go into storage media It lists two hard drives a labeled "/" and the other labeled "80g media" both when high lighted say "unmounted hard disk volume" when i right click and try to mount them it says "Mount: is already mounted, or is busy" I have no idea what the "/" hard drive is.

The only other thing I know how to do is go into the control center, select hardware, then select look at and configure hardware, when I select one of two hard drives "sda" or sdb" and click "run configuration tool" I get the following error:

"I cannot read the partition table of device mapper/nvidia_egbdcjba, it's too corrupted for me :frowning: I can try to go on , erasing over bad partitions (ALL DATA will be lost) THe other solution is to not allow DrakX to modify the partition table. (the error is illegal division by zero.) Do you agree to lose all the partitions?"

Clicking yes brings up the familiar partitioning tool. however It does not show the normal blue NTFS partition, or any partition at all. It just says please click on a partition, but does not show the bar to click on....

SO there it is in all its longness.

Anyone have any idea what I am saying? hehe.

Do you mean you combined two drives into one in Windows? Probably the volume manager they use is simply unknown to the installer (I didn't know you could do that in Windows, either). Anyway, if there are no free partitions and the partition format you used is unknown to the installer, perhaps you need to go back to Windows and resize the partitions so that there is some free room for the installer to use.