Installation plays hardball

[John Aldrich]

On Thursday 31 December 2009, 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.
> 
that's why you should choose the "customize" option when installing. I 
installed F12 on a new hard drive and re-used my /home partition on another 
drive. While F12 didn't work (due to a problem with the way the BIOS has 
the drives -- need to change the boot order and "refresh" the install -- my 
problem, not Fedora's) my F11 system is still here.

As I said, you need to choose to use a custom partition scheme, otherwise, 
Fedora will wipe every linux partition as happened to you. Granted, it's 
not obvious, but if you've been playing with linux for more than a couple 
distributions, I'd think you'd already have some notion of this by now.