14 DAY TRIAL // The Ubuntu installation procedure is governed by a piece of software called Ubiquity and it's one of the most intuitive and easy-to-use installers on the Linux platform. Unfortunately, users have been confronting with a bug that could wipe their entire hard-driver without any kind of announcement.
Reports about users deleting their entire hard-drives while trying to reinstall Ubuntu have been popping up on the forum and it seems that there is already a bug report on Launchpad with this exact issue.
Most Linux and Ubuntu users don't go for the automatic options provided by the installers and they manually install the new operating system where they want, but there are also quite a few users who have made use of an option called "Erase Ubuntu x and Reinstall," which, unfortunately, will delete the entire hard drive.
Lots of users have multiple partitions on their hard drives and even two operating systems. When they will choose that option in the Ubiquity installer, they will lose everything. Things seem to get even more problematic when users also have multiple disks and multiple partitions.
It's been reported that Ubuntu actually deletes the EFI partition on a laptop, along with a Windows 8 installation and the backup. It's strange that such a major problem would pass the close inspection of the Ubuntu developers, but it's good to know that the bug has been acknowledged, its relevance has been elevated to critical, and someone will deal with it.
In the meantime, the main solution for this issue is to simply not use the automate tool that's implemented in the installer. It might seem easier, but unless you don't have anything else on the disk, you should really use the manual installation options, which are in fact quite user friendly themselves.
"I had installed 13.04 Ubuntu but on reboot I never saw the 'grub' style menu. It just kept going into Windows 8.1. So I got the 13.10 version (64 bit) and choose "Reinstall Ubuntu" (That may not be the exact text). It removed all the partiions including the recovery partitions. I do have a backup for the windows install, but I was very surprised that this happened. On a positive note I now have Ububtu up and running on my machine. This is not my first time with Ubuntu. I have installed Ubuntu alongside WinXp, Vista and Windows 7. I've used Ubuntu desktop for over 6 years," reads the bug report on Launchpad.
We'll keep you apprised with the progress made with this bug and maybe we'll get to report that the problems have been fixed for Ubuntu 14.10.