is it all working properly?

get a musicbee library of things you love. check out Qubuz for things Bandcamp doesn't carry. literally just pirate things because it is about as financially beneficial to the artists you love without supporting an AI-powered ICE recruitment tool that's trying to burn the music industry down.

The correct way to tell is to go into the file explorer and simply manually check which drive Windows is actually located on by looking at the files, which is the fastest and most accurate solution

To my knowledge there is no more Windows so rebooting into it is not an option. A google search is not what's needed right now since it would either say "Windows is on the C: drive" (only relevant within Windows) or "Windows is usually on the SSD" (I already mentioned that).

aw that's too bad, at least it seems like we're on the right path with that install process

I'd recommend checking with the file explorer either way. Knowing which files are where is a huge help in the long run

You should see both of those drives on the left, so you can just check both to see which one has the windows folders. By the way, make sure that your Wifi/internet connection works well in that environment, since this is the moment you should check that the basics are working

Those are two separate physical drives so I imagine you'd remember if you opened your PC to put one inside. The drive with Windows would most likely the 512GB NVME, but you can check that by using the file explorer in the live environment you're currently in.

Am i correct in assuming both drives were in your PC when you got it and you didn't add either one yourself?

which one did you have windows installed on? the big one or the small one?

Yep, it'll destroy your current OS so once you're ready then you should boot from that disk by changing the boot sequence in the BIOS to put it first, then make a clean install from there

Well, I don't know what the menus are like so me neither. Honestly, if there's nothing in the app at all I'd just skip ahead and toggle that setting in the BIOS and re/install the OS, tho I wouldn't call that advice since it's going against Intel's recommendations...

The two drives in your first screenshot are your volumes

that would be helpful yeah!

Mint is awesome and the best beginner distro overall.
If you're not afraid of a little terminal use and ready to learn (im no pro either), then CachyOS has been a fantastic Arch-based distro for me so far that brings a ton of user-friendliness to Arch's solid performance

sorry, was off for the night. I would assume all volumes that use RST? but again im not familiar so i can't guide you in detail for that part

Similar to creating Linux installation media, you grab an ISO and use software like Rufus to turn a sacrificial USB stick into a bootable drive. Microsoft offers ISOs and even its own bootable drive creation utility on their support site tho idk if W10 stuff is still available there

okay then i'd err on the side of caution and create windows installation media before changing that RTS setting in the BIOS as a backup in case of any problem. I'd also boot that Linux Mint installation media before anything else to check that everything works before you modify your Windows install

yeah that sounds right, based on the page i linked