Self - Hardware troubles, Distro change

My 20GB 7200rpm ATA66 Maxtor, which I bought in mid-2000, finally died, a year after warning me for the first time. I can't complain - I had ample opportunity to "backup and replace", as the SMART warning said. Most of it was backed up, so I burned all the junk from the other hard drive to DVDR (using Knoppix) and decided to try that newfangled Ubuntu thing (my poor Pentium3 is just too slow to regularly recompile just about everything, as I was running Gentoo in ~x86 and emerge -avuDN world daily…). It formatted a partition I did not want it to format (I believe I have unclicked the option), and misconfigured grub to try and boot from the wrong partition. Admittedly, my partitions were ordered in the partition-table not in the same order they are actually layed out on disk, but that is completely legal. Anyway, after some trivial twiddling with parted mkfs.reiserfs and grub, a second attempt worked. It's a nice touch how they give you a working firefox and thunderbird while you wait for it to install, but the boot takes ages and it chose the maximum resolution for my monitor, not what I find comfortable. Since I only had the 6.06 version on a free CD (thanks B.), I installed that, thinking upgrading to the latest version of each package is trivial. Well, it's not trivial, but it's easy. You just edit a plan text file, and let it download a gig of files. I wonder if it's compiled for at least i686. It comes with a whole bunch of stuff I don't need, it will take me a while to uninstall all that junk safely. Also, it didn't ask *anything* while installing. I'll have to read some logs to find out what it decided to do. All in all, I'm not very impressed yet.