Ok took your advice and put everything vital on an 80G USB drive. Then
repartitioned the 250G with approx 80 G for ubuntu and the balance for my
/home directory. Install went just fine so then I unhooked the USB drive
and tried to reboot. !!!!!! OMG you guessed it. I must have installed on
the USB by mistake. O woe is me LOL. Learn the hard way. OK left the
80G unhooked and reinstalled, this time on the correct drive and all went
quite well
afterwards, reconnected the USB repartitioned and formatted - Dang

OK started playing with some stuff and all of a sudden nothing works any
more, won't even reboot EGADS what have I done now?

So another install- that makes 3 on the same day!!! This one went
well and continues to do so. Still have a lot to learn but got Flash
installed on both my AMD 64's after much gnashing of teeth- Forums are just
great !!! Now I can watch the Youtubes.

Next thing was to fix the permissions so I have total access to all my drives
except the boot drive of course. That was a long tedious process. Is there
an easier way to gain ownership of all my drives and the files contained
theirin? I was using nautilus and that means changing every drive, every
folder and every file within the folder. There gotta be an easier way.