Hey Jack! I'm also sorry for the delay... I've been out of town and just returned yesterday. Your situation still confuses me... it's not your fault as I'm following your installation steps above clearly. What is most confusing is that it seems your installation was successful on the smaller drive, but you are not able to "see" it and you can only see the larger drive... and that is kind of totally backwards, if anything. You should certainly see the files/folders on the drive that Linux is installed on. But let me expand the discussion a little further below.
You mentioned in post #8 above about a master/slave relationship with the drives.... do you know if you have them set as master/slave with the jumpers on the drives? It is usually better to have all drive jumpers set to "cable select" and let the operating system take care of everything from there. Your info above says these are both ATA drives, and the master/slave relationship can be picky with these drives. Besides setting the jumpers, if they are both on a single cable it is important as to which one is at the end of the cable (master) versus the middle connector (slave)... and even the cable is important and must support this relationship. If the drives are connected by separate cables, they should not be jumpered in a master/slave arrangement.... and should be cable select (preferred) or jumpered independently as single drives.
This Seagate article explains it better. I don't think that Linux cares much about the master/slave relationship... but it may affect which drive your BIOS is able to boot.
Linux Mint is usually very good to show every device that you click or double-click on, and you don't usually need to enter the root password to access devices, even a Windows drive. So I tend to think that this is still more of an install problem than a permission problem, but I'm not sure. Your description above doesn't say which drive you installed the GRUB bootloader into, and I wonder if that might be a factor with this problem (as well as the NTLDR hint that you started this thread with, and as well as the hint about possible master/slave issues).
I'm trying to think of the best way for you to proceed (although others may have better ideas), but it may depend somewhat on how comfortable you are to open up your case and see what's going on with cables and jumpers. If your cable(s) and/or jumpers are misconfigured inside the case, then this should really be fixed first. From your descriptions, it seems that you prefer to use the larger 150 GB drive for Linux, but it fails to boot when you switch to it and go against the default for the smaller drive. I'll describe the steps below that I would take to make sure the large drive is used for Linux: (also, while the case is open is a good time for cleaning)
1. Remove power, open up the case and physically remove both hard drives. Take notes to record what you find:
a) One cable or two? (Check: Is this is a wide (about 2") ribbon cable? Slender cables are SATA.)
b) If a single cable, which drive (large or small) is at the end of the cable?
c) Jumper settings on each drive? (If SATA, they won't have jumpers.)
d) If two cables, which drive goes where on the motherboard? The motherboard sockets would mostly likely be marked as HDD 0 (zero) and HDD 1, but they could possibly be HDD 1 and HDD 2.
2. Set jumpers to Cable Select on both drives.
3. If just one wide cable, connect the larger drive to the end position. Position it in the drive bay to leave room for the smaller drive to be added
later. If disconnected, reconnect the motherboard end of the cable into the HDD socket (using lowest number, 0 or 1, if there are more than one socket). Reconnect power to the drive.
4. If two cables, connect the larger drive to the lowest numbered motherboard socket, 0 or 1. Reconnect power to the drive. Do not connect the smaller drive yet.
5. Reconnect power to the case (you can leave the case open or partly open if you want... just be careful about it). Boot on the Linux Mint DVD and do a full installation. With only one hard drive installed (it will be
sda now) you should be able to choose "Use entire disk" and accept the default install configurations for Mint. I suggest to NOT use LVM and to NOT encrypt your hard drive or home folder if you see any options for those.
6. When install is finished, remove the DVD, reboot and make sure it runs okay. Use it a little and reboot a few times to be sure all is well. Use your File Manager to make sure you can see your files and folders.
In the next phase, I will describe reinstalling the 2nd drive so you can use it for data storage... but I want to hold off typing too much in case you do not want to follow this first phase (and in case someone else has a better plan). I will just briefly say that that next phase entails putting the smaller drive back into the case, and again booting on the Mint DVD. The reason to boot on the DVD first is because the smaller drive may also contain a bootloader and I'd like to avoid confusion if it does. Booting on the DVD will let you run a program called Gparted which you can use to erase and format the smaller drive to make sure that it is all cleaned up. The smaller drive will become
sdb when it it reinstalled, and Linux Mint should see both drives with the File Manager without any special steps.
Clear as mud? If you have any questions or reservations, please ask. We may could get everything working by booting on the DVD and erasing/formatting both drives... and then reinstalling Mint into the larger drive as
sdb (the way it sees it now), but I think you should be sure about putting the bootloader on the same drive, and I'm not sure you did.
And maybe I'm missing something? There are lots of smart folks on here, so I'm ready to be corrected if I did miss something, or if someone has a better approach for you to take.
Cheers
I'm not sure what you mean when you say, "you changed it to clear off the drive" during the installation process. I'm also not sure what you mean when you say "you can't see the 74G drive." But since you have a working Linux Mint now we can at least take some time to figure out where you're at. Let's first make sure that you actually have two physical drives (not partitions on the same drive).
