Okay, this isn't really a bug but I couldn't find a better place to make this request. Twice since May I've
accidentally blown away my home partition while trying to reinstall Ubuntu. This is a stupid user error, but its
still aggravating. I've never done this in redhat, and I've reinstalled redhat much more than ubuntu because we
use redhat where I sysadmin. I think the reason I don't make this mistake at work is because redhat's partition
utility shows labels on partitions. All that ubuntu shows is the size and filesystem. I assume you guys have a
reason why labels aren't used, so maybe someone could come up with some better way that the partition tool in the
installer could show what data is already on a drive. Labels were simply the first solution I could come up
with.
We do actually show *partition* labels, but (as far as Ubuntu is concerned) that
only works on Mac systems; standard PC partition tables don't support partition
labels. At some point we should figure out how to make partman display
*filesystem* labels if it can't find any partition labels, which would fix this bug.