On 2012-03-07, Leonardo Sabino dos Santos <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Dmitrij D. Czarkoff <[email protected]> > 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. In my experience people used to having to answer lots of "are you really sure" options just keep hitting enter without thinking. This is not a useful mindset to have on a Unix system. You can think of this as encouraging good habits from the start :) Sure there will be some "oh fsck did I really just do that" moments without the warnings, but these will happen with warnings too - there are all sorts of creative ways you can break things without triggering a warning, often when there is significantly more data on the system. > 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. Just looking at the installer prompts is not really enough for a new user of OpenBSD, it is really expected that people will have to take note of the documentation. There's a clear warning in exactly the place that we'd expect somebody wanting to multiboot to look.. http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Multibooting
