What if I my fingers slipped and I accidentally hit <ENTER> twice during configuring drives, formatted a drive I didn't want to? Shouldn't the default option be DON'T format a drive?

When I configure the system and make a mistake, then cancel, it actually doesn't cancel, just keeps configuring. Shouldn't 'cancel' actually cancel so you can start over, instead of doing nothing?

I am for some fool reason reminded of the old carpenter's motto:

Measure twice, cut once.

Choosing target partitions is precise surgeon finger activity; backup data before surgery.

I feel for your data loss. These kinds of accidents happen occasionally: in an xserve, I used to have four hot swapable scsi drives that pushed in to eject, and, squeezing around the corner from the backside of the rack, my hip accidentally pushed in the corner drive, ejecting it, and causing the others to be renamed with different letters when I was making a RAID array, and had all my data consolidated onto one drive while making an array out of the others... naturally, the one drive got put into the array by mistake, and I lost not just my data, but the data of a few customers too, which created a month-long chore of looking at and renaming testdisk-recovered-image-00000 to testdisk-recovered-image-12345... the filenames were not recovered. (photorec wasn't available back then, maybe it would have done better)...

Ever since then I've taken backups seriously. I like mirroring my home folder on a Linode instance using rsync. I also like portable terabyte drives to quickly image a drive before doing anything (especially if device belongs to someone else).

If you haven't written anything to the mistakenly formatted drive, and you have a backup, rewriting the old partition table will restore your data. If writes were made to the mistakenly reformatted partition and you have lost valuable data, you might get some of it back with tools like testdisk and photorec.


The setup mounted the drives your formatted under /mnt. To really restart, they need to be unmounted. I agree that cancel doesn't all the way unmount. It's not sure how much of setup you want to cancel, just the last operation, or all of setup.

A sure fire way of cancelling is using control-c, which should bring you back to the console prompt, where you subsequently type "reboot" at console. This installer's shell environment can take a "reboot" command, even though the regular slackware cli uses "shutdown -r now". In the installer's console, shutdown is not available, but "reboot" is.

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I didn't say I actually lost data (unless over a decade ago and probably not anything important) but this setup default is a danger to new users, or even experienced users who forget something.

So do I, you just have to avoid then dropping a dinner plate on the drive...

The plate survived, the platters did not

I remember my first install (no linux nor windows) on a brand new Olivetti (286) in the early ninety's : clicked too quickly (imagine, a mouse ! Coming from Apple IIe...) and borked the whole thing !

Since then I carefuly read and double check everything...

What I also mean is if you make configuration mistake so want to cancel that, you should be able to revise.
        Of course you can <CTRL>c and start entire configuration over, but to just cancel one mistake, you shouldn't have to.