Why does the default Ubuntu Install format the Hard Disk?

Fri Dec 30 14:05:05 GMT 2005

On Friday 30 December 2005 19:44, Jay Camp wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 19:45 -0800, Mike Douglas wrote:
> > Considering how experimental NTFS repartitioning is, relying on it as
> > even an option for the installation process seems dangerous. Any data
> > lose caused by that might reflect negatively on Ubuntu. Automatic
> > partitioning of FAT32 and ReiserFS/EXT3 (as an option) would seem more
> > sane, atleast until the NTFS drivers become more stable.
>
> NTFS resizing is not experimental.  I've done probably close to 100
> installs for people at installfests and have never had data corruption.
> Note that this is not the same as NTFS write support.

A little off topic, but  I understand that even NTFS write support is now 
safe. NTFS got a bad rep after "old" NTFS was included in the 2.4 kernel 
despite being known to eat data, without any warnings attached except a label 
of "expiremental" (which to me means, believed to be safe but please try it 
out and tell us if you have any issues).

Now we have the "new" NTFS in v2.6 which only supports loop back devices, 
"Captive" a user space device driver which uses loads the official ntfs.sys 
driver, and Paragon UFSD a closed source driver. I have not found of any 
reports of data corruption being caused by any of these drivers, except for a 
incorrectly set dirty bit. Have I missed some?

> See [1] for details.
>
> Sometimes people have had to defragment before it'd work, though they
> may have just been low on free space too.  

Apparently, it is no longer necessary to defragment before resizing, but 
Ubuntu still uses v1.9.4. [1] below "highly recommends" we upgrade to 
v1.12.0. 

To me at least, a message saying "Erase all data" with a default of "OK" is 
scary. I wonder, if I had fallen asleep and just pressed OK, would I have to 
spend the rest of the day trying to get Windows working again? A working 
Windows install is the rarest and most precious thing on this planet ;)

IMHO we should consider changing the default to "resize". Is there are correct 
way to formally raise this? Perhaps as a bugzilla wishlist?

> I'm not sure.  In any case, 
> if the resize fails an error box can be thrown up saying to make sure
> there's enough free space and defragment the partition.  This isn't a
> data integrity issue, however.
>
> [1] http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html#reliable

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
Masters Student