mandriva help

i just switched to linux maybe less than an hour or two.
anyhoot, this is fun, but irritating only because of my ignorance i assume.
i booted from iso image and then proceeded to putting that image to my hard drive so id boot from hard drive now, like a reg. os. but now my computer is so incredibly slow. i mmean, it was slow when i was running it live from cd, but now its slug speed. i cant figure out how to selecvt the best performance options so please help?
also, i have a hard drive that is 40 gb but its only recognized as 27. i also have a 20 thats being recognized only as 7.

It sounds like a partitioning problem not just because of the size difference but the slowness maybe due to the lack of a swap partition. Which Linux distribution did you use?

If you have access to a live CD, I would consider running something like badblocks (man badblocks) you can run it on a live system (eg. badblocks -s /dev/hda), however it's better if you don't.

Additionally I would run an fsck too.

It sounds like you have drive sector errors, and given the size of th drives which can be correlated to approx age, it is not outside the realm of possibility that surface problems would arise.

my hard drives were working just jiffy-l aike when i was running windows xp not too long ago...

what is fsck? and im running mandriva 2008 spring.

i wanted to choose the easiest thing to use in linux as im a complete noob andi just reallly want a computer that i can listen to music with, im just sick of windows crashing and burning.

Now you know that any OS can give you problems. fsck is file system check. If you want to be adventurous, run it with a -y flag. That tells it to fix everything it finds, iirc.

Personally, I would start from scratch and forget about all that. Delete all the partitions until the entire drive is free space. Then create whatever partitions are Mandriva requires.

im having a bit of trouble understanding linux.i dont even know how i partitioned my drive, i thought i deleted the windows honestly. but please tell me how to delete the partitions, i mean all of them; would i have to reinstall this linux?

and who thinks they have the best tutorial site for linux?

thank you all so much for your time.

First, find a good linux book. That thing will be worth it's weight in gold. And it sounds like you booted to a live cd right? Then laid that live cd to the hard drive? I've done that with slax and knoppix and it worked fine, but for a better learning experience I would get a full hard drove distribution and install that. And take your time, read everything you see on your screen step by step. That seems to be the biggest problem with everything is people get going really really fast and they miss something and can't understand what is wrong.

kc0tma is right. Basically, you jumped into the middle of the pool and you didn't know how to swim.

I got to have a bit of fun that I've never done today in RH133...I'm learning to swim for real instead of doing the doggy paddle. I've always just done my partitioning at the OS install, but today we were adding and removing and resizing partitions and playing with fstab and all kinds of stuff. I never tried that until today, and it is fun.

i definitely did jump into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim.... but i figre the best way to learn anything is to be tossed right in and figure your way out. i just had no idea linux was this much unlike any other OS....very cool though, once i figure this thing out i believe i owe myself a pat on the back.
i just downloaded some html books and mandriva books off the updates section.
i did a live cd boot again and i figured out why my comp was running so slow. when you are just about to boot, the os asks you about the graphics layout you want, you have a choice between no 3d, matric? (i think) and some other double digit word...i picked the matric which pushes the graphic fullest. its so sluggish, and i cant figure out how to take it off, but i dont feel like losing all the music files i put on here as i do not have a usb hard drive.
oh life.

See I think for my first linux distribution, I would just do whatever graffics driver the installer chose to do just to get it running. Then I'd familiarize myself with the command line and how to add and remove kernel objects, then create a new kernel with the fancy graffics and add that stanza to my boot loader menu and see if it works. But don't delete the old stanza! If you google grub or lilo (which ever booter mandriva uses) that will give you good detail on how to do that stuff, but get comfortable with a text editor like vi or nano or emacs, and learn to love the command line before doing anything else.

just because you asked for a tutorial :]
http://howtoforge.com/howtos/linux/mandriva this site has a tutorial on installing mandriva with kde and a separate tutorial for the installation with gnome. which desktop manager you use is purely preference.
there was also a link on another forum that a high school teacher posted (i'm guessing its to his/her website) that has a flash video that's supposed to be a tutorial of the install, but i would definitely read through/watch both resources (howtoforge & the video)
http://www.linuxvideoprofessor.com

it seems there should be a display option in one of the menus where you can change which video driver you're using, what your graphics options are, etc. i haven't *tried* mandriva since 2007 because that install was borked and not worth the time imo =\ lol