Thanks Fred. That was my feeling too. Best to keep what you are familar with. Hoping to do it this evening. Also hoping the "boot repair" app on the disk will negate any boot up problems.

When I was backing up Win 8 I wanted to use a 40GB sata external hdd. There was quite a lot of unwanted data on it so instead of just deleting the data I decided to do a quick format. I formatted to NFTS but afterwards Win 8 did not recognise the drive and therefore could not back up onto it.

Probably stupidly, I formatted again to fat32 but same result. Does this mean that this HDD is now totally useless or is there any way to make it useable again? Thanks It was only a few months old and has had little use.

I will keep you posted about the installation.

Thanks for your help margaret

Try formatting it (or deleting all partitions) and leaving blank i.e. no partition table, then see if 8 finds it? 8 should have formatting\drive tools I know 7 does...

Thanks J. External disk ok now. deleted the partition as you suggested leaving unallocated space. created a simple volume then formatted and partitioned. Good as new. Thanks.

Hoping to install Ubuntu tomorrow and record each step so will keep you posted. M

In my sisters case see GRUB with 8 at the bottom of course ; can't remember what errors posts other than not booting and I don't have it to fix yet...