Thanks for the very clear advice. I'm just wining because I'm tired of going around the hamster wheel installing and reinstalling.
If I had known deleting the partition would was bad, I would have worked harder earlier to avoid it. Who's to know.
Anyhow, I'm going through the reinstall process again (I'm getting pretty good at it). I think one way or another I'll be able to convert the FAT32 to NTFS. I'm confident that I can reboot as many times as I want once the USB has turned into my boot device. Over the past year or so I'm pretty sure I've bought some tools that do this.
If I don't figure it out, I'll be back and I do appreciate the volunteering to chat about it. Hopefully I just have one round left of reinstall.
-Peter