i had to chown my permissions back but this is now solved. windows powershell format and partition to fat32 on my drives originally as the guide was fat32 then changing to ext4 and it seems that when i was doing the new partitioning it just wasn't taking effect for some reason but this is now solved.
thank you sano and shadowron
i've been banging my head on the desk for a week trying to understand linux commands and forcing myself to learn a new OS.