Existing home directory removed during installation of jaunty system WITHOUT ANY CONFIRMATION

[Christian Stimming]

Binary package hint: debian-installer

I decided to install a new (K)Ubuntu Jaunty system on my existing computer which was running an older Ubuntu version. I wanted to keep on using the existing home directory. Here's what happened:

I booted from the "alternate" installation CD-ROM. I selected "Manual partitioning of the harddisk" and chose the previous root partition (say, /dev/sda1) to be used as the new root partition and selected "do not format", and chose the previous home partition (say, /dev/sda2) to be used as the home partition and selected "do not format". I then got the warning question "The root partition already contains an installation; this will be overwritten; do you want to continue?" to which I replied "yes, continue". I then got asked to give a user name for the first user of the system, in which I entered the same full username and short username as I used before (say, "foo"). (It might be that in my previous installation, the user "foo" had a numerical user id different from 1000 (say, 1234), whereas in the new installation the newly created user of couse had the numerical user id 1000, but I was prepared for this.)

What I expected after the installation finished: The existing home directory (/home/foo) on the existing non-formatted home partition should continue to exist and simply be available once I log in as the newly created user "foo".

What happend instead: The existing home directory (/home/foo) was removed completely and replaced by the empty skeleton directory of a newly created user. This removal was neither chosen by me, nor announced by the installer, nor did the installer asked me for confirmation whether I wanted to do this. (Note: The home partition /dev/sda2 was correctly not being formatted, just as I chose this; another home directory /home/bar is still existing as it did before.) Your installer just killed Gigabytes and years of collected data.

What *should* happen instead: Before removing a home directory which isn't empty (or of which "du -s" reports more than a few KBytes of data), the user *must* be asked! I cannot understand why you would allow the installer to remove an existing *home* directory.

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 9.04
Release: 9.04

$ LANG=C apt-cache policy debian-installer
debian-installer:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 20081029ubuntu34
  Version table:
     20081029ubuntu34 0
        500 http://10.152.36.22 jaunty/main Packages