well well well...

after reinstalling things were looking pretty grimm... so while i was in the setup menu i saw a "restore defaults and restart"... whaddayaknow...

i guess i wasn't making as fresh of an install as i thought as evidently some setting somewhere was preventing the access to the installation. anyway, after restoring the defaults it closed down, started back up and VIOLA - ubuntu with no CD. can't explain the joy, lol.

jstephens84 and brucehinrichs, i REALLY appreciate it. (much better experience here than at ubuntuforums, thats for sure). let me know if there are any profile stats for you guys to which i can contribute or something. thanks SO MUCH again.

Did your system have a hidden recovery partition? I once ran into a problem with one of those. My system (windows) became damaged and I was trying to restore it with the OEM disk. It would not boot from the 'rescue disk' It kept giving errors. What I discovered was that it had as the first partition a recovery partition. (which was damaged) It kept trying to change the active partition to this first partition and would fail to boot and would not boot from the CD either.

Hmm.... that is something I completly forgot about. So that explains why it kept rebuilding his windows install.

alan99 -

to be honest i don't really know if it had such a partition. the machine was salvaged from an industrial environment where it was used to control simple hardware and report across a network so i'm sure it had backup upon backup installed/configured. I booted it before installing ubuntu and there was a mob of programs which popped up and couldn't be closed/stopped. the administrator restrictions set by the previous owner were fairly great so i couldn't really tell what was what/where. i'd say that your assessment is a safe bet, though, because that blasted windows boot screen just wouldn't die. would resetting the setup configuration actually go so far as to remove/bypass that partition if it were there

Also - (if this requires a new thread don't hesitate to say) i was going through some tutorials on the terminal and something required writing a txt file to the home directory but i was told by the computer that i wasn't the owner... lol... it's so young... i thought rebellion didn't set in for a few more years!! looked into permissions but the selections for the home folder were grayed out...

Glad you got it working, and equally glad to have helped! :D

Unfortunately, I wrecked another computer fixing that computer.
I was using another computer trying to copy the damaged system files (got stuck on hal.sys missing -- later determined that was not the file I needed but just an alias for another file)
I left the rescue disk in the other computer not thinking it would be a problem as it didn't seem to be bootable. When I returned from work I discover my father had tried to use that computer. It then booted from the rescue disk. Instead of aborting this he let the thing destroy his operating system. I got to thinking "why did that disk boot on one machine and not the other? I bought a partition utility and discovered why. I removed the boot flag from that first partition and hid it and was then able to boot from the rescue disk and fix the system.