The Partitoner Formatted The Wrong Drive!

[Mulder]

Just installed Feisty on my machine.

I am 100% sure, i would literally bet my life that i selected to format and use hda but the partitioner formatted and installed to hdd, which contained everything i own, uni work, about 2 years worth of photos of me and my missus in different places we've been on holiday etc.
All irreplaceable things, and now they're all gone because Feisty selected the wrong device.
Please don't flame saying i must have selected the wrong one, because i'm 100% certain i had hda selected, i made SURE of it.

[Segovia]

Re: The Partitoner Formatted The Wrong Drive!

I feel for you man... Honestly I do. But WHAT IN THE WORLD WERE YOU THINKING?!

You installed an alpha version of kubuntu with a partitioner than is "currently in the process of getting overhauled", without a backup?!

There are warnings about those two things here:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Herd5/Kubuntu

Regardless, good luck to you. I too would be heartbroken to lose the things you listed. Hopefully you will be able to recover some of it.

[Mulder]

Re: The Partitoner Formatted The Wrong Drive!

Yeah i know, it's my own daft fault, that drive WAS my backup lol.

I usually unplug any slave harddrives when installing winblowz, but with linux, i've never needed to.

I've been recovering files for the past 9 hours, it looks promising but some of the files are currupt

Still....better than nothing

[krazy]

Re: The Partitoner Formatted The Wrong Drive!

Yeah, the partitioner in feisty (QtParted?) is buggy as hell.

[raffytaffy]

Re: The Partitoner Formatted The Wrong Drive!

please DO NOT USE my method if youre not ready to fix things and possibly break things...but.. i decided to install feisty , but was aware of this problem. so to work around it, i installed edgy next to edgy...yes 2 edgy installs..and simply updated the new one to feisty using apt-get ( my reasoning was...the more basic set-up without stuff installed yet will spew less errors during update) and my reasoning turned out true. nothing was broken during apt-get dist update. and my other partition was not effected. as i previously stated ; just bcse it worked for me, may not for you. sidenote - if you do decide to give my method a try, please use manual partitioning and pay close attention to how you set up your partitions. when it comes to grub, i suggest you make copy and paste your current to a txt file and put it somewhere it wont get erased ( i used external drive - which i unplug during upgrade) and when u log into new distro ; simply add it.

[3vi1]

Re: The Partitoner Formatted The Wrong Drive!

Really sorry to hear about your problem Mulder - I hope you get the important stuff back.

Also, even though you might get a lot of "why didn't you have an offline backup, dummy" type messages, it's really GOOD that you posted your tale here so that others can learn from your mistake. With alpha/beta software, anything can happen.

I usually back up to an external drive, then unplug it when I'm doing a "clean upgrade". That, or duplicate the important stuff to an NFS share. My really important stuff, I always keep on at least two different systems: I lost a lot of pictures of my kids first birthdays years ago when one of my drives developed and error and overwrote its contents (back when I was using Windows). Now I put all that on a separate USB drive that I keep in a fireproof safe.

That said - I only repartitioned 8 (out of 10) partitions on one of my 2 internal SATA drives when I installed Feisty Herd 5, and everything went fine. I had 3 usb drives connected, and none of them were erroneously touched either. So, the bug might be specific to IDE drives (of which I have none) - if that matters to anyone investigating.