On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 14:49 +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote: > I pressed Enter by mistake there (and realized my mistake a couple of > seconds too late). The kind of confirmation I expected is something > like: "This will erase all partitions, are you sure (y/n)?", or an > opportunity to review the settings before committing to the install. > > Sorry about the tone earlier, but I'm still incredulous that the > install program would do something as serious as overwriting the > partition table by default without confirmation.
That was a confirmation. And I fail to get an idea of the statement about unexpectedness of OS installer overwriting the MBR. When you install operating systems you should generally expect to deal with partitioning, which should result in overwriting MBR in most cases (unless you specifically made some changes to MBR before invoking installer, but in this case you have to pay even more attention to the installer as you want to make sure that it accepted your layout or at least found the place you wanted the OS to land onto). That's not to mention the fact that it is generally wise to back up at least MBR when you install some OS for the first time, as you should generally expect that some problem could arise from lack of familiarity with OS on your account. Overall, your complaint boils down to the statement: "OpenBSD installer should be tuned so that hitting [Enter] all the way gets you to a bootable system without side effects" which is quite contrary to the OpenBSD's user interaction practices, as long as this system is specifically targeted at users with the opposite approach to using PC.
