Thanks for your input. I finally have a working copy of Ubuntu on a separate external drive so I can get my feet wet on Linux command line stuff and test a bunch of stuff. Before it was all done I had a couple of heart stopping hours when the installer partitioned and overwrote a part of my primary backup drive to use as the bootloader. It also rendered that drive unrecognizable by Windows till I fixed that. Fortunately I had already backed up all of my super critical stuff before I started, and recently burned 20 years of photos onto DVD’s, so everything I lost was just fluff. So I effectively chopped my critical files down to what I really need. From 200GB of crap down to 4.5GB that can go on thumb drives.

Then, I imaged EVERYTHING and made a recovery stick so I can wipe everything and do a total rebuild of the whole system in about an hour of recovery time. But not before I had to run a full chkdsk on my main OS drive. Literally every skill I’ve ever learned about disk management, DOS commands and redundant data storage came into play over what should have been a simple OS install. And I only lost about 20 hours of sleep over 3 days. Looking forward to getting a dedicated Linux laptop so I don’t have to dual boot.