On Fri, 18 Mar 2016 15:49:55 -0500 David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote: > On Wed 16 Mar 2016 at 14:49:44 (+0300), Adam Wilson wrote: > > On Tue, 15 Mar 2016 22:41:14 +0000 Lisi Reisz <lisi.reisz@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > > > > So - if you want to format an existing partition properly, so the > > > stuff on it actually goes, use Gparted not the partitioner in the > > > Jessie installer. Sad. > > I can't see why Lisi came to that conclusion from what she reported > here. > > > Is it possible for the d-i partitioning utility to sometimes make > > mistakes when creating a new FS (I have only observed this with > > ext4, if it even happened at all and was not a product of my > > imagination) and somehow leave files from the old FS in the new > > over-riding FS if the two are in the same partition? > > > > Sometimes after over-writing an old ext4 partition with a new ext4 > > partition of the same size and location, mysterious files have > > appeared in the new FS which should not exist, but existed in the > > previous instance; "ghost files" if you will. > > It's far more likely that you forgot to format the partition, if > that's indeed what you wanted to do. > > "over-writing an old ext4 partition with a new ext4 partition of the > same size and location" is exactly what one does if the partition > table gets mangled. People who do that will then cross their fingers > and hope that *all* the pre-existing files reappear. They're not > "ghost" files; they're the actual files which should be untouched by > repartitioning. > > Some people really can't get on with the d-i partitioner/formatter. > At least in its curses mode, it's not the easiest interface. (I've > never tried the graphical version.) The graphical version is literally a GTK clone of the curses-based interface. It responds to exactly the same commands- if one were to close one's eyes and carry out a series of curses interface operations with keypresses then exactly the same result would be achieved. I actually really like the partitioner in d-i. It is a nice mix between user-friendliness (you can just select "guided" if you don't know what you're doing, and there are nice lists of options for everything) and usability for more advanced users. It provides a unified interface for setting mount options, filesystems, partitioning, etc. rather than the fdisk + mkfs approach.
Attachment:
pgpBEKHeUunGk.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature