Installation plays hardball

[Robin Laing]

On 12/31/2009 01:49 AM, Garrick Sitongia wrote:
> I just installed Fedora for the first time on my Windows/Linux dual boot
> system. The Fedora installer gave me the option of installing over the
> present linux installation on the disk, an old Mandriva version. I
> assumed this meant the operating system partition. There were 2 other
> unrelated ext3 partitions for photo archives and e-mail backup. After
> booting into Fedora I discovered that the Fedora installer wiped every
> linux partition without confirmation or consent. I have installed other
> versions of Linux and I have always been given a choice. Your installer
> should indicate that ALL linux type file systems will be wiped, in
> addition to the operating system file system.
>
> Garrick
>

My sympathies.  There are tools that can recover the data if you don't 
write to the disk anymore.  I have done it in the past.

To respond to the rest of the messages.

I have used LVM and it has it's good and bad points.  I have since 
stopped using it due to the issues I had.  The only issue was the LVM 
name on a removed drive that I wanted to recover data from.

The menu system should come up with a "Confirm" by default.  When there 
is existing data, the second to have two pop-up's asking you to be sure 
would be well worth it.  I installed F12 on three different systems over 
the past couple of weeks and in all cases the default was not what I 
would have chosen.

The idea of installing is to replace, upgrading is to keep some data. 
This a user issue.

My only issue with installing was encrypted drives (No LVM) dropping the 
system out of the installation process.  Did it on two different 
systems.  Reboot and restart with the encrypted partitions already 
formed.  I guess there needs to be a bug report.

Maybe a check box for using LVM would be nice as well.


-- 
Robin Laing