Partitioning the disk is not irreversible. Use the Symantek/Norton
utilities and it will make guesses and try to find Windows partitions.
Once the newfs (formatting) starts, that's fairly irreversible.
Alan
On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Dave Anderson wrote:
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>
