Comment 43 for bug 1767703

I've been running Linux as my sole OS since 2001 and have been dual-booting Windows and Linux since the summer of 2015.

In particular, Windows 7 with Ubuntu 15.04.

Upgraded in-place to 15.10 in December 2015. Then to 16.04 in May 2016. Upgraded the Windows side to Windows 10 without issue in July 2016. Then Ubuntu 16.10 in October of that year. Then 17.04 when it came out then 17.10, and finally 18.04 -- all upgraded in place.

However, I managed to hit some Ubiquity bug, so video game performance was degraded:
   https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1733136

I tried following the steps in the bug and messed something up, corrupting my graphical system.

No worries! Just make a Ubuntu 18.04 boot disk and fix things that way! Guess I'm due for a clean install anyway.

Used my wife's Windows PC to make a bootable USB installer and booted my machine off of that. Told it to install "alongside" the existing Ubuntu partition. Install seems normal and takes fifteen minutes or so. At the VERY end: ERROR. "Sorry, your system might be in an unusable state." Um, thanks?

Tried lots and lots of things. No dice. Everything I tried THOUGHT it could install Ubuntu just fine but then would error out at the very end.

Eventually I just had to remove all the partitions from the disk and create one new single EXT4 partition and install Ubuntu from scratch. Which actually worked.

Lost all the files on my Windows partition, since I never dreamed that an Ubuntu installer in 2018 would mess THAT up. Would have lost my Linux files, too, but I actually back those up and in particular had done a full backup the night before "just in case."

This is a bug.

If the installer can't successfully do its thing, it needs to tell the user that BEFORE it has permanently altered partitions with gParted.

Bugs happen. I get that. I ain't even mad.

But to call a bug with 173 duplicates "invalid" just because the very first person who successfully reported it theoretically had a workaround is unacceptable.

Our situations are not the same as theirs.

> A warning message prompted you that this
> could be a problem and recommended performing a bios mode install
> instead, but you chose not to

This is literally false. I never saw any such message. My bug is marked as a duplicate of this bug. So either mine is not a duplicate or this bug should still be OPEN.