Hi all! I made a post here a couple days ago regarding installing Linux Mint, and everyone was very kind and helpful there so I figured I'd reach out again for a new issue that's cropped up. Please heed the flair, I am essentially a newborn baby with a hammer when it comes to anything computer-related... or, like, your well-meaning grandpa who downloaded 500 viruses on his new computer thinking that he really did win $10,000 on a sketchy website. Something like that is the ballpark we're dealing with.

ISSUE

For reference, I migrated from Windows 11 on a LENOVO 82LX IdeaPad 1 15IJL7 to Linux Mint (Cinnamon.) I am so happy with my decision! However, my Lenovo originally came with a 1TB D drive on Windows that became 1TB of unallocated space after switching over to Mint. Being extremely new, extremely overwhelmed and pretty stupid, I panicked, believed it an error, tried to figure it out on my own, followed a soup of tutorials that ended up with me somehow partitioning my main disk (/dev/mmcblk0) in a way that seems to be permanent?

There is this 500MB slice of my main disk that I cannot for the life of me get rid of. I've uninstalled and reinstalled Mint (SO MANY TIMES), completely wiped my laptop with nwipe and tried to use GParted with my limited understanding of it and I can't manage to get my disk back in to one piece. In fact, using GParted I think I somehow deleted the disk itself and had to spend hours rebooting and frantically searching for ways to fix it. It seems much stabler now compared to the life support it was on a few hours ago.

I would really appreciate some advice for how to make it one whole again. It seems like the 500MB is connected to /boot/efi, which I think my original drive was on, and the rest of it is mounted to Filesystem Root. Absolutely NO clue what this means except for it seems like my laptop is hinging on this 500MB partition in order to function? If anyone knows what to do in GParted or even the terminal, please let me know. I just think it's time for me to stop running commands from articles and videos without having a better sense of what I'm doing because I think I seriously almost destroyed my laptop earlier.