On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 5:13 AM, Kenneth R Westerback <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 06:15:25PM -0700, patrick keshishian wrote: >> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 5:41 PM, Nick Holland >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> > Daniel Malament wrote: >> >> On 10/22/2009 5:37 AM, William Boshuck wrote: >> >>>> And here I thought I remembered the new installer being described as >> easier to use. >> >> >> >>> It is. Were it not so quick it would be positively >> >>> boring. Just don't set mount points for the partitions >> >> >> >> Perhaps I should clarify: IMO, not double-checking with the user about >> >> what specifically to wipe, especially when it used to, is a step back in >> >> 'usability' (in the Jakob Nielsen sense) - or to put it another way, >> >> user-friendliness. >> > >> > I presume you are talking about this question: >> > >> > The next step *DESTROYS* all existing data on these partitions! >> > Are you really sure that you're ready to proceed? [no] y >> > >> > This question was asked AFTER you had fdisk'd and disklabled your >> > disk. By this point, the data had been already potentially destroyed, >> > I thought this question quite silly, in that it implies data has been >> > safe up to this point...no, it hasn't, you have potentially been >> > destroying things all over the place. >> >> Hey Nick, >> >> I don't wish to contradict you here, but ... I usually do installs and >> never upgrades. So what I do is keep /home out of the mount points in >> the disklabel stage, go through install, then re-add /home. I recall a >> while back, I did get to this stage and agreed to proceed and as the >> partitions were being newfs-ed I realized I had forgotten and included >> /home in the list. I ^C out before the /home slice was reached. I >> restarted the install, this time doing it "correctly", and my data in >> /home was OK! >> >> Might have been a fluke ... but, it is what it is. >> >> --patrick >> > > Nick's point is that by the time the question came the disk setup > could have been completely changed - new MBR partitions, different > disklael layout of partitions. So the script really had no idea > when it asked that question if your data was already gone. Thus it > was misleading, and thus it was eliminated in the great 4.6 rewrite.
I don't want to belabor this, however, the actual data on the disk (maybe with the exception of MBR) is still safe until newfs-ed. Therefore, even if the disklabel was changed, if the user had a copy of her pre-install dislabel she could revert/recover at this stage. I know there has been suggestions many times over (by Nick Holland I believe) that folks should save their disklabels for similar recovery situations; in fact fairly recently someone reported such recovery on misc@ IIRC. Either way, point made. People who are used to keeping partitions from install to install, should choose the "Custom layout" option as you pointed out. --patrick
