Why does the default Ubuntu Install format the Hard Disk?

[Jay Camp]

On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 19:45 -0800, Mike Douglas wrote:
> Considering how experimental NTFS repartitioning is, relying on it as
> even an option for the installation process seems dangerous. Any data
> lose caused by that might reflect negatively on Ubuntu. Automatic
> partitioning of FAT32 and ReiserFS/EXT3 (as an option) would seem more
> sane, atleast until the NTFS drivers become more stable.

NTFS resizing is not experimental.  I've done probably close to 100
installs for people at installfests and have never had data corruption.
Note that this is not the same as NTFS write support.

See [1] for details.

Sometimes people have had to defragment before it'd work, though they
may have just been low on free space too.  I'm not sure.  In any case,
if the resize fails an error box can be thrown up saying to make sure
there's enough free space and defragment the partition.  This isn't a
data integrity issue, however.

[1] http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html#reliable