boot to sdb 2, no root file

[nyergnva]

first off hello everybody,
this is my first post in any forum but ive been reading them for a while now. so thanks for your help so far. im clearly getting in over my head but i couldnt think of a better way to learn and its been alot of fun, even exciting. ive been reading forums and guides to get me this far but i am getting to points now that are less common. anyway here goes.
i have a muti-boot system on a 500 GB recently upgraded internal hd on a gateway laptop. vista 64 bit, windows 7 dual booted, ubuntu 8.10 on a zip drive and mint on live cd. i put the old drive in a usb connected cradle and wanted to install mint in sdb 2 leaving sdb 1 for vista eventually when i upgrade my other laptops hard drive. the live cd worked fine, got most of the first update package and was surfing w ease then tried to install mint and got the error no root files and wouldnt bring up partition options. so i went to the partitioning tool on the menu and it comes up fine shows all of the drives although seems to hide the used portions of the main hard drive. the only option i had open was unmount so i tried that and no change. im sure there is a bunch of stuff i left out but thanks in advance, still having fun, apologize for my ignorance.

[nyergnva]

solved as usual it seems amuch better solution to read those already then to start anew. thanx to the few