what happens to existing partitions during install?

[Andras Simon]

On 1/10/10, Paul Frields <stickster at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Andras Simon <szajmi at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If I have a number of partitions from a previous Fedora version,
>> and chose custom layout during installation of F12 (just to be
>> able to continue to use the same partitions as before) what
>> happens to those partitions? Are those that are needed for the
>> installation (/boot, / etc.) formatted and the rest (notably
>> /home, /usr/local) left alone? The installer warns that
>>
>> "Any data on deleted or reformatted partitions will be lost"
>>
>> The "deleted" part is clear; but what are the reformatted partitions?
>> I see no option to mark a partition to be reformatted.
>>
>> I've read the relevant part of
>> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f12/en-US/html/ but
>> didn't find an answer to this. I'm pretty sure that "what can be
>> left alone is left alone" but it would be reassuring to see a
>> note to this effect either in the installer of at least the
>> installation guide.
>>
>> Sorry if I'm missing something very obvious!
>
> The editing dialog box for each partition allows you to choose whether
> to format it (along with declaring the file system type, mount point,
> and so forth).

Ooops, then I did miss something obvious: the "Fomat" field, even
though it's mentioned here:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/install-guide/f12/en-US/html/ch06s21s03.html!
Thanks!

What may have mislead me is that I saw no such field during the
installation I did a few days back (I checked it now by redoing the
installation steps on the same machine this far). But that was
probably because, for some reason, the partitions that appeared were
new, not what were already there on the disk, so they needed
formatting anyway.

Andras