From: pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald) Subject: Re: Safety Belt / SLS Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1993 06:23:45 GMT
In article <1993Jan27.000807.28623@newsserver.rrzn.uni-hannover.de> riepe@ifwsn4.ifw.uni-hannover.de writes:
>In article 94187@mavenry.UUCP, maven@mavenry.UUCP (Norman Hamer) writes:
>|>
>|> Something I'd like to see in the MKFS/MKEFS program would be a "are you
>|>really sure" thing if you try to write a linux filesystem onto a partition
>|>which isn't marked as linux... I tried to install the 99p2 SLS release,
>|>ended up writing a linux partition over my DOS partition (user stupidity),
>|>had to restore from week-old backups... Ugh. While I don't have anyone but
>|>myself to _blame_, it sure woulda been nice if it had said "this partition
>|>is marked as DOS... use fdisk to change to type 81 before proceeding"...
>|>
>
>The same applies to mkswap - I once wrote a swap signature into the FAT
>of my DOS partition (fortunately, I could fix it with dd).
The standard solution to this problem is not to go back and hack all
the existing utilities to add such checks and prompts. If for no
other reason than you are saddling all those who know what they
are doing with extra overhead.
Instead, an intelligent administrative front end needs to be written,
that can do the checks for you and prompt you to your hearts content.
In the time that was spent belaboring the point, most of a decent
such shell could have been crafted.
Peter.