Hi... finally!
replying from the ACER machine running Lubuntu 10.10. This is the first boot, so far so good...
Option 3 worked with Lubuntu
1. burn Lubuntu ISO
2. Remove HD from other machine (so I wouldn't have to worry about where Grub goes with more than one HD)
3. Plug me brand new old school ATA drive in an external case via USB (fortunately the machine for the install was new enough to be capable of booting from USB without intermediate steps)
4. Boot
5. Install Lubuntu (went smoothly, I had to have a live internet connection for the network config; I didn't bother trying to be smarter than I am with partitions and there's just one ext4 and one swap -- I guess I can still come back to this in time; GRUB was placed on master)
6. Reboot (failed somehow on the host machine, I think because of its Intel Integrate Graphics; a couple of libraries said to be not found too, I don't know if it matters and if it's peculiar to the distro install)
7. turn off, take away ATA HD from case, place it into ACER machine, boot and voilà!
Many thanks for all the input, this has been quite eventful and long winded as I didn't have much time to spare, just hope it will be stable enough now.
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