The question says it all, i'm a COMPLETE linux newbie.

P.S. I also need to know how to format drives as well.

First of all welcome!

We need more information.

What distro (Mandriva, Fedora) are you using and what version?

There are 100 different distros on the Distrowatch website (top 100). Multiply that by an average of 3 possible versions....you get the idea!

Each may do things slightly differently. Some mount all your windows and linux partitions on the desktop (say some versions of Mepis) and others just mount Windows partitions by default.

In terms of formatting drives, perhaps you can tell us what you have right now and we can go from there. Give us some idea what hardware you have now, and what you are specifically looking to do.

Most Linux distros have formatting utilities within their installers, but, what are you running right now? Windows XP? This can make a difference, as can the system that you have, especially if Windows is pre-installed on your system.