Hello,

I may have screwed myself rather badly today. Namely by unintentionally overwriting all my previous data on my SSD:

Motivation for installing Deepin on my SSD
I've been using POP! OS since April on my current computer, and felt like trying another distribution when reading about the new Deepin 20.

Since many Linux users are known to do "distro hopping" because switching appears to be quite easy on Linux, I wanted to do just that.

So I looked up an article how to install another Distro. With the goal of being able to have it as boot option while still being able to access my user data.

Steps Taken to install the ISO
I quickly went through the first three steps of this article from makeuseof.


So I downloaded the ISO, verified the checksum, and created a boot stick using BalenaEtcher on POP! OS.

Then I restarted my computer and selected the newly created boot stick to launch. It asked me to select a System Disk to create partitions. It showed that my SSD had around 84/488GiB used, and it previewed seven partitions that would be created, the ext4 partitions being "boot", "/", "/rootb" and "/data", which seemed about right. (See this photo for reference.)

Then it started installing and eventually asked for setting up a username and password.
After that, I was welcomed to the Deepin GUI.

Trouble accessing old OS and user data
However, upon restarting the system, I realized that my POP! OS partition could not be selected when booting anymore. So I booted into the new Deepin, and checked GParted.

There were a suspliciously low amount of GiB used across all partitions. So it appears that at the very least, POP OS! and the installed programs were wiped. I saw that /rootb was not mounted, and with about 120MB probably could at least still contain my user data, since I mostly had documents in my usr folder. (Here's a screenshot of the GUI.)

Here are the partitions in the terminal:

So, how much did I screw up?
Can I still boot into /rootb and expect to find my old user data? Or can I simply mount it to access those files? Or did I just inadvertently delete everything I had?

I don't know Deepin, but given the target audience I'm sure you can simply double-click any non-mounted partition in the file manager to mount them. Do so and have a look around. Then post this for us.

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Based on your description of what you did and your partition layout, I believe you over wrote you previous installation. It is always best to check the documentation for the distro your installing as not all installers work the same way.
https://wiki.deepin.org/wiki/About_the_Installer

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If your data is on the sda 1.8T disk, just mount it - if your data is in nvme0n1p4 15G, you may be able to just mount it too, as it looks like it hasn't been added to your /etc/fstab yet.

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Every partition but Rootb was mounted (compare screenshot). The GParted GUI greyed out the "mount" option, however. Does this possibly have to do with the fact that this partition represents my previous user account that has its own password and username?

This is the output:
Heh, I actually quickly went through those instructions you linked before booting from USB.
It never really warned about wiping my previous data, it just stated to back up my data before proceeding. Which sounded like the usual words of caution due to the small but possible risk of (unintended) data loss or corruption when creating partitions. In fact, I remember about reading that "edit the partition" step and thought I'd be asked about it later, which was why I clicked next. My mistake was presumably leaving the option "Full Disk" as opposed to choosing "Advanced"


That big chunk actually was mounted (compare screenshot above), nvme0n1p5. But there doesn't appear to be any of my old files in there, just some default Deepin stuff. PDF files for instance should also be displayed in the search preview if they were on a mounted partition, shouldn't they?

fstab keeps track of permanent mounts, correct? You are correct, nvme0n1p4 (Rootb) is the one partition that hasn't been mounted. But as I mentioned when replying to syg00, mounting didn't work - at least by using the GUI.


That said, some former system configuration files still appear to be in use: I had some AMD error messages of my GPU appear upon system restart or shutdown. I still get some now.

post the ouput of

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Those 19GiB of hidden data corresponds with the size of nvme0n1p6 mounted on /recovery.
Is that merely the recovery for Deepin, or my previous stuff?

recovery for deepin would be my guess, ext4 is a linux file system. It looks like you have a second drive /dev/sda that isn't being used.

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I see.
Yup, that's my HDD that I intended for storing large media files. I might as well could have used that to create a complete backup copy before proceeding.

You did indeed overwrite all your old data by using the whole drive from one of your photos you posted :-(

Attached Thumbnails

 

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Alright. Damn. I guess I should cut my losses then.

Professional data recovery (tools) probably won't be worth the cost for the files I lost here, right?

I mean, I did back up the most important stuff at least, but I still lost some personal work.
(Doubly stupid since those were mostly small textfiles like LaTeX docs I could have just moved to my GDrive... which I even had readily mounted as a virtual drive )

Well, that's what I deserve for relying on proprtionate warning messages when fiddling around with data, and not investing the time for a proper backup (Right, syg00? )

If nothing else, I guess I can

• send the Deepin team feedback on their installation process,
• encourage them to improve their usability, and
• and prevent future dum-dums like me from nuking their files

To be fair Deepin did warn you to backup everything you wanted to keep, and that the data partition had 0 bytes on it, (Check the image you posted and I posted as well) so I'm guessing you'll be praising the Deepin team for warning you and for telling you that your data partition had 0 bytes on it.


How else do you think they should have warned you, may be a few more "are you sure you want to continue?", " Are you really sure?", "Absolutely certain?" " Phone a friend?" ....... or maybe something else?


One good thing I guess - you've learnt now and won't do it again!



Don't worry we've all done something like this in the past.


Good luck

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Oh, I won't argue that it's ultimately me that is at fault.

But I did actually see and read that error message. Nonetheless, the warning could easily be improved on:

It's not the kind of error message that conveys the severity of the next click. (Which is what I mean by proportionate warning message.)
Of course, it seems obvious for people familiar with the process. But there are pitfalls for the other user group (of which I happened to fall into).

Let's put on our user experience hat for a minute to consider how this could go wrong:

• Ordinary placement: It's placed below the header like a regular step description.
• No signifiers for importance: No accentuation of any kind. (Bold font, colors, size, exclamation points, highlight, etc.)
• Potentially misleading phrasing: "Important data" only covers a subset that you'd really want to keep no matter what (for example if the next step touched that data, but didn't actually delete it). "Data you want to keep" would have been a clear alternative phrasing here that conveys the destructive nature of the next step.
• Casual phrasing: The warning covers half the sentence, the other half suggests to go to the next step after that, further diminishing the severity.
• No signifiers for caution: The selected disk shows the used disk space in blue with a blue checkmark right of it, which can be misinterpreted as indicator that there's still enough space left for the new OS. Since the process overrides the existing content, a warning symbol would have been more appropriate.
• Misleading partition preview: The previewed partitions on the bottom covering "/", "rootb" and "data" further add to the impression that the old data will be part of the new partition table

Obviously nobody in the Deepin team intended for this confusion - I'm glad for all the engagement in the community!
Yet, as it stands, it is an unfortunately misleading design from a UX perspective.

All this adds up. As a result, I merely took at as a word of caution to save the most important stuff in case of unlikely data corruption, expecting an integration of new and old partitions - not that it'd wipe all data for certain

So I would in fact suggest one warning message to pop up, around the lines of:

Given that many programs will ask you to save your last 2 minutes of unsaved data when you attempt to close them, this seems like an appropriate step of caution by contrast.

I think they'll appreciate the feedback ticket as constructive feedback, especially considering they're otherwise very beginner-friendly and design-conscious

Definitely, haha!
Thank you.