Well, there goes Windows!

[Garrett Cooper]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 6:17 PM, Nathan Whitehorn
<nwhitehorn at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 08/18/11 18:24, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>>
>> So, I used the bsdinstaller again on the 9.0-BETA1 media with manual
>> partitioning. The HP desktop ate up 3 partitions, I inconveniently
>> forgot that geom can't grok secondary PC MBR partitions, was fooling
>> around and cleared the partitions, etc. I hit abort to exit the
>> partitioner start and from scratch and now my Windows partitions and
>> recovery partitions are gone.
>>
>> So, oops... just a word of warning for anyone else that monkeys around
>> with bsdinstall that it doesn't always hold true to the "will apply
>> changes at Exit" guarantee right now (i.e. atomicity is busted). If
>> someone else has a second OS that they'd rather not lose, at least
>> they will know to reboot their box when committing changes.
>>
>> I'll inspect the code sometime this weekend to trace down the annoying
>> bug, but this is probably release gating for new users (and sadly
>> forces me back to wanting to use sysinstall :/..).
>>
>
> There are only a couple of cases when it does that, and it gives you a giant
> warning in all capital letters to ask if you really want to proceed. One of
> those cases can be changing partitioning type. Can you elaborate on how you
> made this happen?

    I simulated the issue in VirtualBox, like so:
    1. Grab the Fedora 15 image (you could grab another version of
FreeBSD though, or your choice OS). Install image to disk.
    2. Boot BETA1 media.
    3. Choose LiveCD.
    4. Login as root, password "".
    5. Type in bsdinstall and hit enter.
    6. Enter in all prereqs (hostname, keyboard map, etc).
    7. Choose "Guided" partitioning.
    8. Choose "Use all disk". This destructively modifies the
partition table, unlike some of the other options.
    Why does "Use all disk" need to commit immediately, instead of
virtually deleting the partition table?
Thanks,
-Garrett