What could I have done wrong? *updated

[eeezzzeee]

I set up my mint with root, swap, and home. The other day I did a reinstall of mint as I had screwed up my video card settings and at the time did not know about live cd fix. When I reinstalled I formated my root partition and did the reinstall. Somehow the files on my home partition were deleted as well. I did not tell the install the format my home partition, but it seems it may have done that or installed over it. I am just wondering what I did wrong when I did that reinstall? Luckily I didn't have anything really important in my home partition, so I didn't lose anything. I just want to know what I may have done so I don't do it again in the future.

[NoClue!]

During the install you will be presented with a summary page, at the bottom it will tell you which partitions will be formatted. Make sure your /home partition is not one of them.

[eeezzzeee]

I'll remember to check that, I thought I was being careful to only partition root, but if I had accidently selected the home directory that would make sense.

[eeezzzeee]

Well I figured out what happened, and before I tried to fix it on my own I figured I'd explain and ask real quick. My /home partition was not deleted, however when I did the reinstall Mint installed another /home on the partition that I installed it in. So now I have a /home folder in my / partition and one on my sda8 partition. I want my home folder to stay seperate from my root partition so when I do installs/reinstalls I don't lose my data. My question is how to remove the /home from my filesystem. Should I even worry about this? How do I avoid that install in the future?

[cmost]

You inadvertently selected the same hard disk partition for both your root "/" and your home "/home" directories. To clarify, during the partitioning phase, you might choose sda1 for "/" and sda2 (or another disk altogether, e.g., sdb1...) for "/home". In your case, you apparently chose the same disk partition (e.g., sda1) for both partitions which resulted in two home partitions; a new one and your old one. Oops.

[eeezzzeee]

I don't remember it giving me an option, i told it to install / to sda8, and I already had my /home from a previous installation. It installed another home folder. Not a big deal though, I'll change change the save paths to my other partition and not worry about it.

[cmost]

Just because you have another /home, doesn't mean Mint (or any other distro) will automatically see it and add it to the installation. Since you did not specify your existing "/home" partition, Mint went ahead and created one within "/", which is standard practice. That's why you didn't have a choice. Next time, you will need to *add* your existing "/home" partition during the partitioning phase of the installation.