Installing U12.04 on an old partition...

so, i've done this kind of thing numerous times. I keep a triple boot
laptop,

and share /boot between different distros. Also keep /home on a big
partition. So obviously I know very well to only let the new system to be
the one that is reformatted and leave /boot and /home alone. Did that
again this time. But.... found /home nicely empty.

The only thing I can imagine is that I was asked what partition type /home
was, and maybe I told it ext4, where it was still ext3...... but the end
result

was that i lost it all, very sad.

Found an interesting file in /var/log/installer/partman, that may be useful
to decipher. Hope to report here later, but maybe somebody else has run
into this corner case as well. I've convinced myself it reformatted my /home
without me asking for it!

peter

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On Mon, 2012-04-30 at 13:00 -0400, Peter Teuben wrote:
> Installing U12.04 on an old partition...
>
> so, i've done this kind of thing numerous times. I keep a triple boot
> laptop,
> and share /boot between different distros. Also keep /home on a big
> partition. So obviously I know very well to only let the new system to be
> the one that is reformatted and leave /boot and /home alone. Did that
> again this time. But.... found /home nicely empty.
>
> The only thing I can imagine is that I was asked what partition type /home
> was, and maybe I told it ext4, where it was still ext3...... but the end
> result
> was that i lost it all, very sad.
>
> Found an interesting file in /var/log/installer/partman, that may be useful
> to decipher. Hope to report here later, but maybe somebody else has run
> into this corner case as well. I've convinced myself it reformatted my /home
> without me asking for it!

If you change the filesystem type of a partition it *has* to be
formatted! This bit me once a while ago --ubiquity should really warn
about formatting anything with data on it as it does now if you *don't*
format system partitions.

'Vantage number three!' said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake about my
scheme of having a large common data area and very small home partitions
in multi-boot situations. It's trivial to symlink to stuff that should
be in /home/~ and you don't confuse things by having multiple and often
conflicting .conf files in a common home directory.


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pongo pan
Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:56:40 -0700
Epicurus up 3:07, 1 user, load average: 0.72, 0.74, 0.78
Linux 3.2.0-24-generic
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, gnome-session 3.2.1, unity 5.10.0



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On 04/30/2012 01:56 PM, Pongo A. Pan wrote:

On Mon, 2012-04-30 at 13:00 -0400, Peter Teuben wrote:

Installing U12.04 on an old partition...

so, i've done this kind of thing numerous times. I keep a triple boot
laptop,
and share /boot between different distros. Also keep /home on a big
partition. So obviously I know very well to only let the new system to be
the one that is reformatted and leave /boot and /home alone. Did that
again this time. But.... found /home nicely empty.

The only thing I can imagine is that I was asked what partition type /home
was, and maybe I told it ext4, where it was still ext3...... but the end
result
was that i lost it all, very sad.

Found an interesting file in /var/log/installer/partman, that may be useful
to decipher. Hope to report here later, but maybe somebody else has run
into this corner case as well. I've convinced myself it reformatted my /home
without me asking for it!

If you change the filesystem type of a partition it *has* to be
formatted! This bit me once a while ago --ubiquity should really warn
about formatting anything with data on it as it does now if you *don't*
format system partitions.


darn, that's worth a bug report, or re-bug it again. I'll check out
launchpad. I did see lots of other comments in regards to ubiquity
being rather careless when to reformat partitions. Scary.



'Vantage number three!' said the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake about my
scheme of having a large common data area and very small home partitions
in multi-boot situations. It's trivial to symlink to stuff that should
be in /home/~ and you don't confuse things by having multiple and often
conflicting .conf files in a common home directory.


you sure have a point there, keeping a common $HOME can cause
major issues if you switch distro's or even upgrade, OTOH, keeping
them in sync if you switch back is also a pain.

thanks for the feedback!

peter







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