Mint 11 installer wiped my data drive :-(

[joetheblow81]

1TB of data gone without warning, what the hell?

Booted from DVD, selected installer, selected "Install alongside Windows 7", hoping i would get a screen asking me where to install it to (primary drive has 3 partitions).
Instead it jumps straight to "Copying files" under the timezone selector. "No problem" i think, its just setting up the installer, it'll ask me where it put the OS in a minute, so i wander off.
It finishes, and i find that my secondary 1TB data drive has been reformatted from NTFS to ext4, and Mint is stitting there.
confused?!?
Absolutely terrible, am now trying everything i can to recover. How in the hell can an installer obliterate a whole goddamn drive without at least ONE, preferably multiple, warnings that data is about to be overwritten?????

[eiver]

Yes... I would consider removing these options from the installer and force the user to do manual partitioning until better working options are developed.

[samantha42]

I soooo understand your frustration. Here's my tale of woe, hoping for some help.

Manual partitioning failed. Mint 'removed conflicting operating system' during install. Only, it was the partition holding XP pro spk2 in a formerly functioning dual boot with Mint Katya 32bit.

And the install erased my ntfs partitions with data I shared with both windows and Mint. It left the partitions intact, but data-less... wiped clean. Did not tick the boxes to format the ntfs partitions, either.

This was perhaps the third time I installed Mint, installed Ubuntu 11 before that. Never had this problem before...XP dual boot was rock steady.

I reinstalled Mint this last time because it installed with the 'UNITY' desktop, no toolbar on Firefox, Thunderbird, any open folders so I couldn't control anything. Guess what? The Trash from two times before yielded some of the files I had moved to the trash 2 installs ago. Obviously this install mapped to the same disk space.

So, the reformat is just deleting the pointers, not the data. But live Mint saw nothing at all, anywhere. Is there a chance the shared space can be recovered??? Maybe even XP???

Even after XP was erased, on this last Mint install, after deleting and ticking the format box for Mint only, it produced the message that it was removing the 'conflicting' operating system.

So, I am about to install XP pro spk 2 from my well used slip-disk, but I shall not install it first. Just an experiment.

Anyone else see anything else like this?

P.S. Mint Katya 64bit is working like a charm since May 27th on my laptop.