Hi again. I'm about 18 months away from retirement.... and I'm greatly looking forward to being a couch potato! Don't burst my bubble!
Well, let's go slow. Tomorrow is my last off day and then I start 12-hr day shifts, so even the evenings will be limited for me, but I know my friend Wizard will jump in to help also. He's actually better at this stuff than I am anyway.
So, your Linux installation did fail. I see that more clearly now. About the only successful part from your description is that it created a partition on your D: drive. But, it's also time to teach you some new lingo... because it can be very important in the installation process. In the Windows world, your C: drive is your first HDD, very likely marked on the motherboard as HDD0 (HDD Zero, because computer people think they're funny and don't start with 1). In the Linux world, that hard drive is called
/dev/sda. The "dev" means "device". In Windows, your 2nd physical hard drive, your D: drive, is very likely marked HDD1 on the motherboard if it has its own cable, but it may be cabled together with the 1st drive in either a master/slave configuration or using Cable Select. Either way... it is a physical drive, and in Linux that one will be
/dev/sdb.
If you only had one hard drive... you still might say you had a "D: drive".... but that would be a partition. But we know yours are separate because you told us they are different brands (Samsung and WD). Even the different sizes did not tell is for sure, but different brands leaves no doubt. Linux would also tell us more clearly. In Linux, partitions are identified with a number appended to the drive.... so,
/dev/sda1 is the first partition on the first drive, and
/dev/sda2 is the second partition, and so on. You're probably catching on to this by now... it isn't too hard, but it confuses new Linux users. And the primary lesson to all of this is that you do not want to do ANYTHING to harm your
/dev/sda drive.... or your Windows 7 could be toast. That drive has its own Windows bootloader installed and working, and you are able to boot on it from your BIOS Boot Menu. If you start to get really nervous at any point about what we're doing, you can unplug that drive to protect it.... but then Linux will look at your other drive as
/dev/sda instead of
/dev/sdb.
But, some things you describe aren't making total sense to me. (It might be me, not you. I'm tired.) Even in a failed installation scenario, if Mint created a Linux partition on your D: drive... it should not have erased the data in the NTFS partition. If it was going to do something like that, it would have erased the NTFS altogether, I think. So that might be a good sign, or at least I hope so. I'm hoping that your XP data is still intact, and maybe you can recover that, or maybe even make it boot again. What I'm not sure about is when you say the Mint "Computer" icon shows this drives as being empty. So, let's confirm that with Gparted (just don't make any changes) and see if you can show us some screenshots.
Boot the Linux Mint USB and run Gparted. When it opens up, it should be showing your
/dev/sda (Windows 7) drive. There is a dropdown box in the upper right corner that you can use to select
/dev/sdb instead, and of course that should be your Windows XP and Linux drive. The dropdown selector also shows you the total drive size, so this should make it clear that you are looking at the correct drive....
/dev/sdb = 1.5 TB = D: drive = WinXP.... right? If you use the ALT + Prt Scr (Print Screen) keys, it should make a screenshot of the Gparted window that you can save. It might be easiest to logon to linux.org right then to come here and upload that screenshot, since I'm not sure how hard it might be to transfer it off to another pen drive, or your external HD, or whatever. But if you have trouble with the screenshot, then write down the values that Gparted shows you... especially for any NTFS partitions and how much Used space they have. If the
sda and
sdb don't match the C: and D: --- then we'll need to check this more carefully! We can't mix these up!
Whew! That's a lot of chatter just for that, huh? But I hope that explaining it as I go will also help you as you make the transition into Linux. I also want to be very careful not to make anything worse. As you've already found out, installing an operating system is a lot different than installing a simple program.
A couple of last comments for tonight. I still think your CPU is 64-bit.
Here is just one of many places that indicates it is AMD64. But a way to check while you are still running on the Mint USB is to open a terminal (Control-Alt-T is a quick shortcut) and enter this command:
Just for clarity, that is LSCPU but you must use lower-case, and the next character is the "pipe" which is located by a Shift+backslash (on my keyboard.... some could be different). The pipe is a straight vertical line, sometimes shown as two lines. After you enter the command, it will report back to you either 32-bit or else 32-bit, 64-bit.
4 GB of RAM is great.... Linux should run fine for you. Mint is a good distro, but I just seem to see a few more issues with Cinnamon than Mate, especially with graphics, but its your choice. The two main things are to find a distro that works well with your hardware (sound, wireless, graphics, etc) and that you are comfortable using. The comfort part sometimes takes getting used to because there are many differences from Windows.
In the Member Introductions, you said you wanted to get away from Windows. If Gparted shows your XP drive is still holding data, and if we can get that moved over back to your backup external HD, would you want to install Linux only on that hard drive? If you want to keep XP, do you have the installation CD/DVD for it? I'll also have to do some checking if XP has the same tools as Win 7 for restoring the bootloader. XP was a good system, but I haven't used it in a very long time.
OK, enough for now! I'm probably wearing you out!
Cheers