installed U12.04 on an old partition, my /home partition got wiped

[Peter Teuben]

On 04/30/2012 01:56 PM, Pongo A. Pan wrote:
> On Mon, 2012-04-30 at 13:00 -0400, Peter Teuben wrote:
>> Installing U12.04 on an old partition...
>>
>> so, i've done this kind of thing numerous times. I keep a triple boot
>> laptop,
>> and share /boot between different distros. Also keep /home on a big
>> partition. So obviously I know very well to only let the new system to be
>> the one that is reformatted and leave /boot and /home alone. Did that
>> again this time. But.... found /home nicely empty.
>>
>> The only thing I can imagine is that I was asked what partition type /home
>> was, and maybe I told it ext4, where it was still ext3...... but the end
>> result
>> was that i lost it all, very sad.
>>
>> Found an interesting file in /var/log/installer/partman, that may be useful
>> to decipher. Hope to report here later, but maybe somebody else has run
>> into this corner case as well. I've convinced myself it reformatted my /home
>> without me asking for it!
> If you change the filesystem type of a partition it *has* to be
> formatted!  This bit me once a while ago --ubiquity should really warn
> about formatting anything with data on it as it does now if you *don't*
> format system partitions.

darn, that's worth a bug report, or re-bug it again. I'll check out
launchpad. I did see lots of other comments in regards to ubiquity
being rather careless when to reformat partitions. Scary.

>
> 'Vantage number three!' said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake about my
> scheme of having a large common data area and very small home partitions
> in multi-boot situations.  It's trivial to symlink to stuff that should
> be in /home/~ and you don't confuse things by having multiple and often
> conflicting .conf files in a common home directory.

you sure have a point there, keeping a common $HOME can cause
major issues if you switch distro's or even upgrade, OTOH, keeping
them in sync if you switch back is also a pain.

thanks for the feedback!

peter

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