Monsieur*, and it'd sound more grammatically correct if it were 'monsieur elitist' (mr. elitist).Edmond Dantes wrote:I did check the size, elitist monsiuer.
It sounds like the distribution you were using has some bad terminology in the installer. The 'completely replace Windows' just seems to be a 'wipe all partitions and cram the OS onto it', whereas most Linux installers I've used allow you to manually make/remove partitions before the installation and use those terms quite clearly.For some reason, it kept fucking up when I picked the latter two--it wouldn't take the entire USB drive (apparently they were partitioned before). But when I picked "completely replace Windows,"
Why hadn't I used this option in the first place? Because due to its label, I assumed it would nuke Windows even though I was installing it on a USB drive... which fortunately, it won't in that case.
Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose, but if you were unsure of which drive was the USB one, you should have run the installer without the USB drive in, then exited, rebooted and run the installer with the USB drive plugged in so you would know for sure whatever new drives appeared that those were the ones belonging to the USB. It also sounds like you weren't aware it was partitioned, but that would have helped identify those partitions as belonging to the USB. If you're really unsure still and worried you might wipe your drive when trying to partition it, back that sucker up (you obviously need an extra drive to do this). There's tools out there that'll let you save your drive as a kind of image file and then restore it (Norton Ghost). If you're ever unsure of which drive is which when you're messing around with partitioning, you're basically playing Russian Roulette with your hard drive; stop and spend some time figuring out which drives are which before continuing, or make sure you have a backup if you do screw up.
I empathize with your loss, it can be quite annoying to mess around with an installer you're unfamiliar with only to fuck it up, and drive naming/assignments can definitely seem obtuse if you're used to a Windows environment, but very few Linux distros are made with the intent of being user friendly like Ubuntu, and in those cases they don't generally expect you to fiddle with partitioning much I think. Generally, the people who go messing around with multibooting and drive partitioning are expected to either know what they're doing or learn the hard way to be extra careful, so you're not going to get terribly much sympathy if something goes awry. Next time, if you're worried, take a picture and post it ("which drive is which?") or something. Waiting to install that OS and making sure you know what partition belongs to what drive is better than risking an unfortunate data loss I think.