What that was supposed to do was open Nautilus, the graphical file manager, as
root, in /root. It evidently didn't work. I personally would just use the
terminal for any serious file management, but then that's just me.
As to your strange partitioning problem, what you seem to be doing is deleting
individual partitions all the time within the confines of the same partition
table. If you want a clean disk, boot with a live USB, run fdisk (make sure the
hard drive is not mounted- if so, umount it) and hit 'o'. That should create an
entirely new partition table on the disk. Hit 'w' to save changes and exit. You
now have a fresh disk with just a partition table. If you want a *really* clean
disk (that minty fresh feeling) dd if=/dev/zero of=<disk> and wait.
I personally think Trisquel's graphical installer is a piece of shit, and would
always use a netinst CD, so I can actually install what I want, and have a
decent installation experience. Anyway, in the disk partitioning step (this for
the text-based installer, but it should be roughly the same for the default
installer too) do not delete or add individual partitions first, but select the
disk itself. Example: you have your fucked up disk displayed below:
/dev/sda
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
/dev/sda5
Don't play around with the partitions, (sda1, 2, 5) select /dev/sda, and when
prompted to create a new partition table, select yes. /dev/sda is now clean.
You can add partitions to your heart's content now. Just don't mess up the
password thing this time.
I think it should be more or less the same in the graphical installer- hunt for
some 'make new partition table' option or something.
