Hi Matthew, On Sat, Dec 31, 2005 at 01:48:25PM -0600, Matthew Ulrey wrote: > To whom this may concern, > After booting up the Debian Etch cd it didn't give me an option to > choose what hard drive to use. So after giving up after several errors > while attempting an install, I noticed that it wiped out my 300GB > storage drive and my main Windows Drive. My Mepis drive was intact but > the Windows and all Storage related to it was wiped clean. I have lost > everything that I have which includes pictures, resumes, documents, tons > of music, and EVERYTHING that my mother left on her computer after she died. You have my sympathy; losing data is never fun, and I'm sorry that Debian was part of that experience for you. FWIW, given the potentially destructive consequences to existing partitions, I always advise people to back up their systems before playing with *any* installer, particularly one such as the etch installer which is still in development. Not that I always do this myself, of course... Depending on how far into the installation you went, it's possible that much or all of your data is recoverable; if only the partition table has been overwritten, or only the partition table and part of your data, there are tools available to assist in restoring partition tables based on the on-disk data and recovering that data. (I can't give you specifics, I'm afraid, as it's been some time since I've needed to do this, so I don't know which of the available tools are worthwhile.) > I have refused to ever attempt a Debian install again and I hope > that you can fix this so it does not happen to other users in the > future. We MUST be given an option of what hard drive to use for install. To be honest, in over a year that I've followed this list, I've never heard of a case like yours. Since well before the sarge release, the installer does tell you which drive it's trying to install to, and no action is taken that would wipe any drives without user confirmation. It is true that the default is to do automatic partitioning of the selected drive, deleting existing partitions, but the user is first given a choice of drives to install on if multiple drives are detected. If you can be more specific about which version of the debian installer you were using, I can look into the matter of whether there are any bugs in the handling of this step, but I'd be rather surprised if such a bug had gone unnoticed for any period of time. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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