Well after a couple days of no replies on the mailing list or forum I finally figured out what to do. The key was to boot into recovery mode - yeah stupid I didn't think of it first. Then I had to run fsck manually to repair the clusters that were messed up on the disk. This was great and all.... but being new to Ubuntu had not a clue that recovery mode would do this for me. Recovery mode in Windows or especially in the days of DOS could mean something very bad..... Norton made a lot of money selling Norton tools for a reason. Chris