On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Stuart Henderson wrote:
>On 2012-03-07, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos <leonardo.sab...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff <czark...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 2012-03-07 at 13:26 +0100, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos wrote:
>>>> Next, the disk stuff comes up. A lot of partition information appears
>>>> on the screen, followed by the question:
>>>>
>>>> Use (W)hole disk or (E)dit the MBR? [whole]
>>>>
>>>> At this point I'm actually trying to remember if there's a way to
>>>> scroll back the console, because some information has scrolled of the
>>>> screen. I try PageUp, PageDown, Ctrl-UpArrow, Ctrl-DownArrow, but
>>>> nothing works, so I press Enter.
>>>
>>> You were asked whether you want to edit MBR or use the whole disk, and
>>> you chose using the whole disk. This resulted in your disk being
>>> occupied by single A6 partition.
>>>
>>> So, what went wrong? What kind of confirmation did you want?
>>
>> 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.
>
>The thing is, then you'll want another after you edit disklabel,
>and another before running newfs (which is the first part which is
>likely to be really tough to recover from). And then when the OS
>is booted maybe you'll want rm to ask for confirmation, etc.
To be fair (which is a bit difficult given the tone of the original
message) he has identified what may be the only place in the install
process where a single wrong keystroke can do major damage. Everyplace
else I can think of there's at least an opportunity to abort the
installation after making a mistake but before the damage is done.
I've no great love for 'are you sure' questions, but they may be
appropriate where they prevent a single easy-to-make mistake from
causing serious damage.
Dave
--
Dave Anderson
<d...@daveanderson.com>
