Comment 20 for bug 1668148

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Graham Mitchell (graham-grahammitchell) wrote :

I spent days trying unsuccessfully to do a clean install of 18.04 onto a system with an existing version of Linux. Each time the installer would appear to be working properly, only to bomb out with an error after half an hour.

Eventually I gave up, REFORMATTED MY HARD DRIVE and was able to get the install to complete.

It makes me really frustrated to learn that the installer used to detect my exact situation and warn about it and now just blindly goes down a path that cannot succeed.

I agree 100% that it's a bad idea to present users with a choice that they have no hope of making correctly.

But I also agree 100% with Phillip that if the installer can detect that it has been booted in EFI mode and that it's trying to install onto a hard drive with an existing BIOS mode install... just proceeding with the EFI install is the wrong thing to do.

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1770966 for the literally hundreds of people that were caused pain by this change.

I've been using Linux since the mid 1990s and using Ubuntu since 2006.

This upgrade from 17.10 to 18.04 was really unpleasant. It's among the worst Ubuntu upgrade experiences I've ever had... and the only one in which I've lost data. For an LTS release, that's simply not acceptable.