i'm having a little trouble with putting mint on the small 80gb drive, well its mostly due to the installer, i tried formatting it using gparted, and it took no time at all for some reason :S but for some reason no other disks are showing up in the install alongside other operating systems besides my windows 8 disk, not even my windows 7 installation on my 1tb drive is showing up :S should i choose the format drive option? just i'm not sure if it will just choose a drive automatically and mess everything up :S

You do seem to be having a lot of trouble.
Does your machine have BIOS or UEFI?

Most Linux will install to BIOS fitted machines, only a few will install to a UEFI based machine.

When installing to a USB drive, some distros do not take into account that it will be the first drive when it is booted from.
(In these cases one has to change the bootloaders kernel booting line to reflect this.)

Likely the easiest way for you to install Linux is to disconnect your internal drive whilst you install your distro to the USB drive.
(That way it should be set up as the first drive, which is what it should be to boot from it.)

Your computer then needs to be set up to boot from external drives before built in drives, or else use your computers function key to access the boot order menu at start up.

Not true.

Mint definitely installs to a UEFI PC (although it was a bit messy as it was my first time).
You could certainly choose to stick with a MBR disk and do a non-UEFI install though.

UEFI is supported by the major distros.
It's not as easy to use as a DOS type bios and I get the strong impression
that you need to partition your disk as a GPT disk instead of a MBR disk.
(I may be wrong on that though)!

Many UEFI bioses try to provide a "legacy boot", but it doesn't always work well.

Can I suggest the OP submits an updated list of their disk partitions, with what disk is supposed to hold what and mentioning which disks are external (if any) and especially mentioning those disks connected via USB (if any)?

good news, i appear to have linux working perfectly now, by overriting my smallest drive i have an Xubuntu boot running perfectly ^^ as a result i think this threads purpose has reached its conclusion, i'd like to thank everyone who helped me out. thank you for helping me join the wonderful linux community