Installation from USB Stick Catastrophic Failure

[Steve Carlton]

I have done dozens and dozens of installs over the last four years and never had this kind of trouble. When I tried to specify the partition for /, both its size and type of primary, when I tried to continue I kept getting an error message along the lines of can't unmount /mnt/migrationassistant do you want to go back? I went back and tried several different variations, but all within the normal boundries. I kept getting the message and then suddenly the installer starting installing files. I thought I was safe, but when the machine rebooted I had a completely altered menu with what I call Ubuntu from hell. It booted the splash and said it was 10.04 (my previous was Ubuntu 11.04), but the logo and progress dots where off to the left. At desktop was Unity. It sort of worked, but all of my files where missing of course. I have used Ubiquity dozens and dozens of times, it has never failed me until now. In retrospect I should have done a "lsb_release -a" to see what installed, but I was too irrational at that point.

I had a recovery disk and managed to save my Windoz portion of the menu on my Acer Aspire One, my old Ubuntu files also were backed up for the most part. Reconstructing the rest will be just an annoyance.