Hardware

Sorry, I edited that out from under you. I decided it wasn't a useful question; using a graphical linux installer deprives you of nearly every bit of useful information.

Installing it on it's own, seperate drive would be a good idea if you're not intimately familiar with linux, grub, and how the two work with each other. I never did like the idea of dual boot; when it works it works well, but if anything goes wrong you've you've potentially destroyed two operating system installs and are given no feedback about why...

Thanks for your ideas.

What I fail to understand is this: Isn't grub only necessary for multi-boot? And if so, why would I need it, given the fact that there exists no Boot or System partitions on "Disk 1" (as shown on Page 1 of this thread) in my Disk Management map?

Any OS needs a bootloader, even Windows(i.e. ntldr). Linux isn't too picky about which bootloader you use, but definitely has to have one, and grub is the standard choice these days because it's so flexible.

I wouldn't expect a Windows disk manager to have any idea what a Linux system partition looks like. There's whole categories of information it's not telling you. 'fdisk -l' in a linux shell would be much more useful than a windows screenshot.

Okay, if/when I ever get to that point, I'll try to get into a "Konsole" (sp?) and execute the following commands:
Right?

Any functioning console. It doesn't have to be a GUI one. That red prompt you saw on the gentoo disk was a functioning console, if you'd been able to type in it.

Okay, so you're giving it its own drive then. Hook that drive up by itself and mint should install much easier (and with much less risk of it trampling over anything else). Once it's installed, you can control which drive your computer boots first through the CMOS settings, or perhaps f12 boot-selection if your BIOS has that.

"alt-f4" doesn't close a window in a prompt because there is no window. You're not in a GUI! You don't have to "escape" the dmesg output either -- it quits by itself when it's done, so do nearly any console commands except editors and viewers. That red thing is a "prompt", when you see a cursor flashing beside it that means the console's waiting for you to type something into it and hit enter.

So you didn't "quit" anything as there was nothing to quit, I think you actually managed to switch to a different console. When a gentoo minimal CD boots it puts you into text mode, in terminal one. There's at least six separate terminals available via ctrl-alt-f1 through ctrl-alt-f6. alt-left or alt-right cycle through them in different directions I think.

alt-f4 is a Windows thing anyway. In lots of window managers it does nothing.