Comment 45 for bug 106209

This is not a bug that will affect newbies since, very few if any, will already have an installation of linux installed in another partition. As matter of fact, one has to be an OS junkie to have enough partitions defined to be installing a new version of linux when you've already got one installed! I ran into this problem recently (Oct. 21, 2008) when I installed Intrepid to a partition where I had previously installed Hardy, with Gutsy being the version I use every day.

Searching for a solution, I found https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/132762 and it's duplicate https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/134763 , both of which appear to me to be duplicates of this bug. I added my comment at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/132762/comments/5

As asked in my comment on bug #132762, is there any harm in not altering the UUID of partitions that are referenced in fstabs on other partitions? I think it would be a nice touch if partman could scan for fstabs in other partitions and report back to the user, for example:

 "/dev/sda7 is mounted as /home for an installation on /dev/sda6.
Are you sure you want to format this partition? Warning! You will lose any data you have stored on that partition!".

 Another example for this laptop I am using to post this:

 "/dev/sda5 is mounted on the followining
as /media/sda5 for an installation on /dev/sda6.
as / for an installation on /dev/sda5
Are you sure you want to format this partition? Warning! You will lose any data you have stored on that partition!"

Another nice touch would be to have a "Preserve UUID" check box in the "Prepare Partitions" dialog (see http://img.xrmb2.net/images/801816.png for an example of the current dialog).This check box could be made unavailable if the results of preserving the UUID would be dangerous or if the file system being used has changed. This check box could also be informative in the case of indicating that swap partitions will have their UUIDs preserved, but at the same time made unavailable so that it just serves to inform. That would have prevented this https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/287539.

An option to comment out references to obsolete UUIDs in fstabs that contain them would round out a set of patches that could possibly eliminate this problem.

I continue to be amazed at the progress of linux and ubuntu in particular. It's just that this is one of two relatively straightforward issues were the only negatives in an otherwise absolutely flawles install procees. Apart from this issue and an issue with my installed version of grub not handling the 256bit inodes on the newly formatted ext3 root partition, everything worked "out of the box", iincluding wireless networking!

Alan