I've been mucking around with Slackware 10 for a few months now and I noticed something VERY troubling during install. Perhaps I am missing something important,.

A few months ago I decided to remove an older SUSE 9.0 distribution and replace it with Slackware 10. The rig had two hard drives, /dev/hda and /dev/hdb with hdb1 being shared via Samba so that I can store files on it from any PC.

When I decided to install Slackware 10, I wanted to wipe hda and keep the contents of hdb so that I could mount my second drive later and access my files. During install, I formatted hda with a swap and root partition. I then configured the Slackware installer to "Do Not Format This Drive" for hdb1 and gave it a mount point of /mnt/driveb.

After install, what I found was horrible. The contents of /dev/hdb1 were no longer their. I had lost all of the files I had stored on /dev/hdb1 when using SUSE. Luckily I had a backup of these files, but the fact still stands that Slackware wiped my HD without me asking it to.

So, after recovering everything I was back in action and Slackware was a great distro.

I then ran into some problems which caused me to wipe hda and reinstall Slackware 10, once again. Knowing the problems I had with my secondary drive before, I decided to try somehting different.

Instead of choosing /dev/hdb1 and telling Slackware "Do not format" I decided to not tell Slackware anything about the drive. I only formatted /dev/hda and never touched /dev/hdb from within the installer.

Again, I had the same problem. After the install completed, I wasn't able to access any files on /dev/hdb1 once I mounted it.

Does anyone else have any experience with this problem? All of my drives are formatted using ReiserFS. I'm not sure if I am missing something when working with a ReiserFS partition as I am used to ext2/ext3.

Does anyone have any idea as to why Slackware keeps wiping my second drive on install? It's very frustrating to say the least.

Thanks,
stanleypane

I didn't have your problem. I had two computers with Debian on them. I decided to put Slackware 10 on one which was reiserfs. I told it not to format the /home partition. It didn't and my files were still there.

I use reiserFS as well but upgraded from a Slackware 9.1 install. Did a fresh install, /home was untouched and so were my music partitions and others.