How to rescue your partitions after upgrade to Fedora 18 Alpha eats them

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2012-09-25 at 01:31 +0100, Ian Malone wrote:
> On 25 September 2012 00:55, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
> > On 09/24/2012 04:44 PM, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> >>
> >> On Mon, 24 Sep 2012 08:09:11 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan
> >> <pocallaghan at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >>
> >>> >On Sun, 2012-09-23 at 13:33 +0200, Jakub Kicinski wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> >>I recently had a weird problem after "upgrade" to Fedora 18 Alpha. I
> >>>> >>decided to share the solution, maybe it will help someone.
> >>>
> >>> >
> >>> >This should be posted to the Fedora test list, not here. F18 is not a
> >>> >released system.
> >>
> >> Sorry, won't happen again.
> >
> >
> > Please don't think you've offended us, Kuba, or that we want you to go away
> > and stay there.  It's just that in this case, you asked a question that
> > we're really not qualified to answer, so Patrick pointed you in the right
> > direction.
> >
> > And, there's no reason to sign off of the list if you haven't already done
> > so.  It won't be too long before F18 has its coming out party, making it
> > very appropriate for this list.
> 
> Actually, I think it's worth having this mentioned on this list. The
> problem (F18 alpha will eat your data) is fairly well known on the
> devel list, but the fact that Jakub thought this needed a post
> suggests that people on the users list aren't aware of it at a time at
> which they might start trying Alpha. So starting a 'here be dragons'
> thread is not completely unwarranted. (Also a bit extreme to say we
> absolutely cannot mention F18 here when the assumption on devel is
> often that you are a maintainer or developer, this is the users list
> after all.)

None of these lists have rigid rules, but they do have community
guidelines. Keeping discussion of unreleased development versions to the
Test list is a sensible example. My take on Jakub's post is that he was
unaware of the Test list until it was pointed out to him. Someone who's
going to be trying out F18 at this stage (it's still months from
release) really needs to get on the list that's specifically for devels
*and testers* or they're going to have a frustrating time of it.

poc