ubuntu 8.10 installer - repartitioning: does it know what it's doing?
 

It happened again. I thought the stone age of linux installers was over, but the pretty new ubuntu 8.10 managed to trash my hard disk.
This is a Dell inspiron 1420 with a 160GB hard disk and intel centrino duo chip. I had already installed an older version of Suse on the machine so that there was a dual boot with vista and Suse. Today I tried to overwrite the Suse part and replace it by Ubuntu 8.10. I swear I didn't do anything extavagant: Put the disk in (ubuntu-8.10-desktop-amd64.iso, since it's supposed to be a 64 bit machine) and select install. After some time it came up with a pretty display of the partitions on the disk and how it was going to reorganize the partitions. The proposal looked all reasonable, it would install ubuntu over the existing suse partitions, but was going to make some resizing which was not going to change the size allocated for vista. So I let it have it.
- And the mountain turned and churned came up with this ugly yellow tagged message: "Error writing partition to hard disk" (or similar) and that was the end of it.

I'm kind of mad about this. If software could have an attitude, then I would call this "cocky". First it displays utter self-confidence by making a beautiful proposal of the repartitioning work to be carried out- with 3D apeal, reflections and all. It lulls the user into acceptance, like: "Don't you worry, I know how to do this. Just press OK!" And then it starts the same old cranky mechanism as for the last two decades, which eventually crashes without much fanfare. It should have said: "Sorry I can't do this, I'm confused. Please try manual partitioning."
In the past, I would have had to count cylinders and fill in lists and keep notes, and when I finally press OK and it goes over the Jordan - at least it would be somehow my own stupid mistake. But i wouldn't be dumbed down by using flashy software. Now I basically forgot how to do partitioning manually.

In the meantime, vista is defragmenting, after it found its pieces of brain splattered on the disk, and still somehow could come back to life. I didn't expect that: It went through a 20 minutes cycle of mysterious disk fixing and eventually emerged. It still has no clue that 80 GB of the hard disk is missing. (That's OK, what you expect from vista?).

Since you know what you're doing, stick to creating and formatting partitions yourself. The only 'magic' way which works reliably is to format the entire disk - if you do anything more complicated there are always chances that someone makes a mistake with the scripting. I've always had a great distrust of installers and disk partitioning, especially since installers usually seem to have an MS-like option to wipe the entire drive.

Hi pinniped: You're right. The reason I wrote this was as a warning to others. I got way too trusty towards flashy repartitioning methods.

Just to concur - here is some comments I made a little while back.