Since I have all my job hunting material on this machine, I think that caution will prevail. I'm planning on picking up a spare disk which I can mount and dd the 8.04 partition into a save file on it. Then I can try the upgrade and if it crashes badly, I can bring up a live disk and dd the 8.04 partition back. I'm not positive that dd would be better than tar so I might want to play around a little before doing anything potentially disastrous.