Bug#60290: boot-floppies: Failing when installing over rhat
On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Randolph Chung wrote:
> In reference to a message from tpo@spin.ch, dated Mar 13:
> > Package: boot-floppies
> > Version: N/A
> > Severity: normal
>
> err... which version of boot floppies did you try? we can't fix this unless
> you give us more info.
I used the "current" ones from frozen on the local mirror of
sunsite/debian. It's updated daily. I did the install on the 12/13th of
March, I don't know which ones were current by then.
On Tue, 14 Mar 2000, Joey Hess wrote:
> tpo@spin.ch wrote:
> > After installing over a former RH I discovered that the contents of /home
> > had been rm -R *. I think that is an extemely bad idea. I can not see any
> > use doing so, but I can see a ---lot--- of grief for people (my case
> > ;-) loosing all their data. Please don't do it. Remove that from the
> > scripts. please.
>
> It seems you must have ignored the warnings that said your partition was
> being formatted and all data would be lost.
I did -not- initialise any partitions. I did "Mount a previously
initialised partition" (btw. not everything on the partition was erased -
but /home/* in particular --was--).
On 15 Mar 2000, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> Furthermore, the subject line is disturbing. What do you mean by
> "installing over rhat".
There was a RedHat 6.0 installed on the laptop and I did an install of
frozen over it (using the disks-i386 set...).
On 15 Mar 2000, Debian Bug Tracking System wrote:
> It has been closed by one of the developers, namely
[...]
> Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>.
[...]
> User is confused, I think. We don't rm -rf /home, but it does
> repartition partitinos if told to. Closing this.
No, user is not confused. The user has just lost the whole contents of
/home without contributing himself to that fact in any other way
than installing Debian/woody over an existing RH6.0. Btw. I'm not saying
that there was a necessarely rm -rf /home executed - I'm saying that the
--contents-- of /home were deleted. As I don't know how the installation
routine is exactly going about it's business I can only guess how this
happened - maybe when the existing /etc/passwd was overwritten with a
new/default one, the system performed a sanity check and removed all files
that belonged to unknown uids? Maybe it just went into home and saw there
were directories from non-existing users? Maybe it did some "command
--force" resulting in the loss of previously existing stuff by the same
name? I don't know. I just know that -I- did -not- delete my /home/* and
that home is -now-, after the woody install, -empty-.
Close the bug as you wish - fact is, the install unfortunately did some
very unnice stuff here - it might have vanished by miracle - or it might
happen again.
*t
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