Drives y, z etc..???

I'm hoping someone can explain this to me, and hoping I explain the question right...

First I think my problem is in understanding the filing system or whatever of a mac or maybe this is because I created 'My account2' (which I created when I first got this and never deleted? ...

I was cleaning out my HD of dup mp3s... I thought I had gathered them all on my computer until I did a search for one song using finder, which leads me to this question.

What drive am I using when I just startup my computer... My account1?
What is Macintosh HD and how do I delete things from it and why is that diff from 'My account' as I am the Admin.
Is Macintosh HD just basically the shell my account runs off?


Lastly this is a parallels question, but what is drive y and drive z? My account1 and My account2 or Macintosh HD?

Thanks in advance and I hope someone can explain this to me.

Macintosh HD is not a shell. It's a name for your hard drive. It is also your boot device. Accounts are just that, accounts. Their 'home' directories will like in /Users (also a directory with / being the root of 'Macintosh HD' ). So you'll have /Users/Account1 and /Users/Account2.

Since I have fusion and not parallels I do not know for certain what y: and z: are but it sounds like shares on the host operating system.

The reason the "Macintosh HD" icon looks like a hard drive is because it represents your hard drive.

On a mac every drive has a distinct name, rather than a letter of the alphabet as under windows.

So "Macintosh HD" would most likely correspond to what a Windows user calls "C:".

Files at the root of the harddrive are owned by the system and can only be changed by a System Administrator.

Files stored in a users folder (e.g. "/Users/Aptmunich/Documents") are owned by that user and are only accessible to the owner of that account.

Parallels probably creates "virtual" drives (Y: , Z for Windows.