installer silently overwrote existing partition

[Peter Teuben]

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.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: ubiquity (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-24.37-generic-pae 3.2.14
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-24-generic-pae i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu7
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed May 2 08:00:03 2012
InstallCmdLine: file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.lz quiet splash -- maybe-ubiquity
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release i386 (20120423)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/tcsh
SourcePackage: ubiquity
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 998492, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.

[Peter Teuben (teuben)]

I don't see yet how 998492 can be a duplicate of this bug, they really appear to be very different, unless there's something hidden in the attached logfiles that I didn't pay attention to, since in my case everything installed just fine, just that my precious /home was reformatted without a query :-(