FS#11657 - Installer could be more idiot proof when formatting partitions

Attached to Project: Release Engineering
Opened by Scott (Mashi) - Sunday, 05 October 2008, 00:49 GMT
Last edited by Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be) - Saturday, 14 February 2009, 14:43 GMT
Task Type Feature Request
Category AIF
Status Closed
Assigned To Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version None
Due in Version 2009.08-alpha
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 4
Private No

Details

Description:

In the Prepare Hard Drive/Set Mount Points section, it is moderately easy to make a mistake if one is unwitting or hasty. Consider this situation (which happened to me earlier):

I created a new partition with cfdisk which was between two other preexisting partitions. I naively expected that the order of the partition labels in /dev (/sd[xx]) would be updated to run according to the physical order of the partitions. When it came to choosing the mount point for /, I chose the wrong one, and the rest is history!

I have an idea that might help prevent this from happening in the future. There is a confirmation dialog that looks like this:

----------------------------------------------------------------
| Would you like to create a filesystem on /dev/sda3?
|
| (This will overwrite existing data!)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|--------------------------------------------------------------
| yes no
|--------------------------------------------------------------


There is enough free space in the above dialog to give some simple information about the partition, such as the current filesystem, how much free space the partition has, the partition label if it has one, something that might prompt the user into reconsidering their decision.

I don't mean to pretend that my small loss was worth anyone's time to implement this, but perhaps it might be a good feature to prevent it happening again, and make the installer a little more newbie freindly as well.


Additional info:
* package version(s)

arch 2008 06 core img

* config and/or log files etc.

Steps to reproduce:
Outlined above
This task depends upon

Closed by  Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be)
Saturday, 14 February 2009, 14:43 GMT
Reason for closing:  Fixed
Comment by Devin Cofer (Ranguvar) - Sunday, 25 January 2009, 03:24 GMT
+1. There's a fine line between making extra effort to be more "idiot proof" and making extra effort for something _anyone_ could mess up, but I think this is definitely the latter. When it comes to formatting data, being verbose is a very good idea. Linux masters are onyl a little less susceptible to being hasty and messing this up as noobs.
Comment by Dieter Plaetinck (Dieter_be) - Saturday, 14 February 2009, 14:41 GMT
Ordering of partition naming is not necessarily related to the order of partitions on disk. it is usually done so by convention, but you can easily verify you can avoid this by deliberately leaving a gap and filling it later, or even just giving partitions custom numbers in fdisk. fdisk even warns you when the order is different. (not sure about cfdisk)

Note that /arch/setup is being deprecated.
AIF (the new installer) (available as alpha on 2009.01 and probably stable for the next release) has a totally different partitioning UI, which among others shows the size of the partition and it's label. I don't remember exactly if it also mentions any "current" filesystem on it.
I think this should do the trick.

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