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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