This is more of an "out of interest" post to see if anyone else has had a similar problem.

I have two drives, multi-partitioned and was installing Dapper through the live CD. Everything was fine and I selected my partition to install. I am absolutely sure I did this right as hdb2 was a 3G partition (just for system files) and this was listed correctly on screen. Yet when it installed it went onto hda2 (a 27G partition) and overwrote all my data!

It could be that I missed something on screen, but as hda2 is 27G not 3G, I don't know how.

I have another post about trying to recover my data, this is just to see if anyone else has had a similar problem.

If it was user error (or lack of scrutiny) then fair enough. If it isn't, then best to flag it up.

I have absolutely no moans about Ubuntu - and have used it since Hoary - so in some wierd way I hope it was my error.

Sorry to break the news to you, but most likely it's human error. Always backup your data! What I do when I install Linux is I mirror my drive just in case. If I mess up, I just restore the image and voila! Back to normal

The process to select partitions could use better positive response. At the end of the partition selection a summary is displayed of what will be done. This is a good time to double check before committing to re-partitioning. If it doesn't look right you are allowed to backup to the setup screen. I always pay extra attention at this point in an install.

Thanks for the responses. I thought I had checked (certainly the first screen) and when the second came up about where to allocate /home etc, I just cleared all the ticks from format apart from the / which I thought was on the right partition. Oh, well, spilt milk and all that.

As for backing up, I thought I was good - in fact I was rather smug - but boy did it go wrong.

I have two hard drives; one for live data (/ and /home) the other for large files such as video and backups. At the end of each month I write a compressed image of /home to the other disk. However when I was using the PC last week, I got a message about an inconsistency in the partition table so went about correcting it.

Out came a spare hard drive, copied over nearly all the data, but thought I would get rid of all but the newest backups. Saw July backup and deleted the rest - but it didn't occur to me that at the middle of July there wouldn't have been a backup! It was last July........ Still I merrily copied all the files back onto the re-partitioned drive.

So when, coincidentally, the data got over written, I smugly thought - restore time. Only to get that sudden feeling of doom as I realised I'd just gone back a year and lost everything in the last 12 months!

Yes, I will be more cautious and probably take my backups to bed with me in future!!!