installation can silently reformat other partitions

Bug #993212 reported by Peter Teuben
6
This bug affects 1 person
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Ubuntu
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Bug Description

During a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 on an old system partition, i decided to already use my existing /home partition so it would be mounted when booting back. My laptop in this case is triple boot, and I decided I wanted to keep the Ubuntu 10.10 until happy with 12.04.

For some odd reason you need to pick the type of partition (ext3,ext4,...) when re-using /home, which will then be used. I guessed wrong. It was ext3, and i told it was ext4. That's problem one, because at this stage the installer could be complained or picked ext3. I explicitly did not tag this partition to be formatted, in fact, only /dev/sda3 (my new /) was tagged for reformat, I also re-used /dev/sda1, which is /boot for me, to handle a shared /boot between the triple boots on this machine.

The sad outcome of this interaction was that my /home (which was ext3) was reformatted to ext4 , which is totally unacceptable! The installer program should have come up with a dialog that it would reformat a partition that wasn't tagged to be reformatted.

I found /var/log/installer/partman with information on this chain of events.

Revision history for this message
Peter Teuben (teuben) wrote :

Whoever marked this as a duplicate of bug #998492 should explain that. This bug does not crash, instead it silently overwrites precious user partitions.

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