On Thursday 31 December 2009, Garrick Sitongia wrote:
I just installed Fedora for the first time on my Windows/Linux dual boot system. The Fedora installer gave me the option of installing over the present linux installation on the disk, an old Mandriva version. I assumed this meant the operating system partition. There were 2 other unrelated ext3 partitions for photo archives and e-mail backup. After booting into Fedora I discovered that the Fedora installer wiped every linux partition without confirmation or consent. I have installed other versions of Linux and I have always been given a choice. Your installer should indicate that ALL linux type file systems will be wiped, in addition to the operating system file system.
that's why you should choose the "customize" option when installing. I installed F12 on a new hard drive and re-used my /home partition on another drive. While F12 didn't work (due to a problem with the way the BIOS has the drives -- need to change the boot order and "refresh" the install -- my problem, not Fedora's) my F11 system is still here.
As I said, you need to choose to use a custom partition scheme, otherwise, Fedora will wipe every linux partition as happened to you. Granted, it's not obvious, but if you've been playing with linux for more than a couple distributions, I'd think you'd already have some notion of this by now.