Confusing side-by-side installation screen
Phillip Susi
psusi at cfl.rr.com
Sun Oct 17 17:11:26 UTC 2010
I am bringing this issue up resulting from a user complaining on the
forums about their windows install being unintentionally overwritten by
a side-by-side install of Ubuntu in this thread:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1595807
To sum up the matter, after choosing to do a side-by-side install, you
are presented with a box representing two partitions: the existing
windows one, and the new proposed one for Ubuntu, and you can drag the
divider to choose their sizes. Underneath there are two buttons labeled
"Use entire disk" and "Use entire partition". The user understood the
partition in question to be the one shown in the image above where
Ubuntu is on the right, and windows is on the left, but the partition it
was actually referring to was the single existing windows partition.
These buttons effectively reverse the previous choice to perform a
side-by-side install and opt instead to replace Windows. Users can
easily be confused by them and think that since they already chose to
perform a side-by-side install, that their Windows install will not be
removed. Therefore, these buttons should be removed from the screen.
A bug was filed about this, but has been closed as WONTFIX. I believe
this is wrong and so further discussion is needed. That bug is here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/655950
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