Changing fs type should show the format option as checked since it will be formatted

[Shekhar]

If you select a different filesystem type for a partition it forces it to be formatted, but this is not clear because the format check box does not become checked.

[frznlogic (oan)]

Confirming this error in Ubuntu 10.10 as well, as it happened to me last night during reinstallation/moving from 10.04 to 10.10. This is a critical error to me and caused the loss of 150 gigs in my user home directories. Luckily there are (somewhat dated) backups.

[sithlord48 (sithlord48)]

This JUST happened to me w/ the 11.10 daily build (kubuntu 8.5.11) the drive simply contains a / , swap , and /home partitons in that order. disk is a MBR scheme. the swap and /home are logical partitons with the / being a primary partition. i chose to format the / partition,(was running 10.10 already). and when it finally booted i found my /home partition had also been formated . both / and /home were already ext4 partitions.

[Laszlo Almasi (almalaci)]

This happened to me too yesterday. I don't recall any warning messages just a greyed out format box. I did see it but I thought I will be asked before proceeding. Older versions of ubuntu installers always used to ask for confirmation. Where did that go?

I lost about 200GB irreplaceable data and NO BACKUP. I'm devastated...

[John McCabe-Dansted (gmatht)]

BTW, you can recover some files from a formatted partition. See e.g. PhotoRec. There are also more powerful proprietary tools that can recover pretty much everything including directory structure. That said WHY?

I just did this on 12.04. I chose ext4 in the Edit partition dialog box. I noted that the format box was unchecked. I ticked OK. The format box was in the "Install" dialog was STILL unchecked. I hit "Install Now". The precise moment I pressed "Install Now" it added a tick in the "Format?". I quickly tried to stop the install, but by the time I had it had already been formatted.

As I understand Ubiquity has a two second delay before it adds the tick to the "Format?" column; this allows the user to check twice (i.e in both dialogs) that the format box hasn't been checked, and still have their partition formatted under them.