Re: Installation overwrote windows installation too easily

Karl Larsen wrote:
Alan E. Davis wrote:
One user called me after trying to install on his desktop. He was
struck by about four power outages during the process, and as it
turns out, Ubuntu installed all over the entire (SATA) disk. Only
one hdd is on his machine. There is not trace of Windows left on the
machine. The experience of many others was that despite their worst
fears, they were left with the capability of booting either Ubuntu or
Windows, at boot time, and they were pleased that Windows was still
the default.

For my friend, however, this wasn't the case. FIrst of all, he asks,
is there such a software engineer who can recover the windows data
after a formatting with ext3?

No. If the disk is formatted you have to rely on your backups. There is no
other chance to recover. Except maybe for those three letter agencies
with a big budget.

And second of all, I think I would like to reiterate my comment, some
months ago, that Ubuntu's installer makes it too easy to overwrite
all the partitions. I would suggest (without being a programmer
myself) that it would be fairly easy to set up the installer with
simpler messages, and require more verifications before actually
doing the partitioning---especialy when selecting to use the entire
disk. It should, in fact, be almost impossible to overwrite the
entire disk unless one really tried. My friend said, after an 85%
install, the reboot saw the system just install itself. I'm not sure
what he meant, but I think the upshot is that while he was given an
option at one point to install beside windows, the installer finally
overwrote the disk.

If you have software that can make a new partition on a hard drive,
it can ruin your entire hard drive. The problem is Windows.

No, it isn't.

If you load
Windows on a large hard drive it will make one large partition using
the entire hard drive.

Ubuntu isn't different - unless you know something about partitions and
use manual partitioning. If you don't plan to use a second OS you want
your OS to use the entire disk, no matter what disk size you have.

But you are missing the point. The user unintentionally selected to use
the entire disk instead of resizing the Windows partition.

Then if you want to load something else you must
take it from Windows which throws files all over the hard drive. Your
going to get something ruined if you take some space but maybe not too
much. It helps to Defrag just prior to loading Ubuntu. I hope they did
that.

Yes, sometimes it might help but I'm not confident about that. However if
you have Vista it is even better to use the partitioning tool coming with
Vista to resize the Windows partition.


Nils

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