App to format hdd

Believe us, they’ll click through the warning while ignoring it. Equivalent to the tiniest speed bump ever…

This is precisely the problem. If someone can’t figure out <this>, then they really shouldn’t be messing with it.

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How about a slightly bigger speed bump? Like create a random 3 digit number? Enter ‘390’ to proceed or type in ‘y-e-s’ if you understand. That way people don’t just mash the ok button.

For us people who are intimidated by the command line, reading “unplug all your devices except the one you’re formatting” is a lot easier to follow than mkfs.ext4 /dev/sd. Either way we could still format the wrong drive.

For me, I would rather be focusing on which drive to format/take out rather than focusing on syntax.

It really feels like you are trolling now… I’m not sure how else we can convey that we will not expend effort on the development of such an app…

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I’m merely suggesting. Like I said before on other threads. this is your party. I’m just a guest.

If you don’t want to make an app like that, it’s okay. I’m not making it personal. And certainly didn’t mean to offend anyone here

The OSMC installer allows writing to portable media.

We’ve had issues where drives have been erased without their knowledge etc.

The installer clearly says that the media will be formatted for installation of OSMC and the user has to confirm that they wish to image the media once again.

People still make mistakes.
The only way I could see it being viable is if we had a drive bay and the drive was called Bay 1 etc, but we don’t have that.

I understand most people here are very comfortable with the command line. Since OSMC started out as a project to install to your pi.

But since the start of Vero, you guys already attracted the attention of “regular” people. Those who buy Vero do so in the spirit of having the same capabilities you have without learning how to DIY it on a Pi.

It would probably have to be more like this…

Are you sure you want to delete everything on this drive permanently. type Y/N

y

Invalid response. Please type Y/N if you want to erase all your stuff.

Y

Once again you seem to have problems reading, Please type in Y/N to accept responsibility for your actions.

Y/N

Thank you. Just to be clear you are going to erase anything on that drive. 
This is totally on you if you delete the only copy of your great aunt Myrtle last picture. 
This is your final warning. To proceed please type
"ifideletemygreatauntMyrtleslastphotoitisonme" and hit enter.

ifideletemygreatauntmyrtleslastphotoitisonme

The pass phrase was incorrect. exiting...
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It’s not that we don’t want to make it, that would be trivial… But surely you understand the phrase “support burden”…

Yes. Of course. No worries. The point of this thread is to explore the possibility of this feature. Not to force my agenda.

Even with the potential danger presented by the installer I still use it. And actually prefer using it over gunzip and DD. I’ve also recommended this installer to some people. So far they’re happy with it.

Well that’s just a bit over. Don’t you think? :rofl:

You forgot to warn the user that the passphrase is case sensitive :joy:

My goal is to make things as simple as possible. We were the first distribution to introduce a GUI based installer for Pi.

But I’m not sure I see a benefit in making this process simple yet.

The only exception would be if no partition table was detected – but even if that is risky: broken drive; or something we don’t recognise. Some good encryption systems will look like random data entirely. And when a user inserted one of these drives we could prompt and say ‘The drive you inserted looks like a new hard drive. Would you like to format it for use with OSMC?’

We then format as ext4 and they wonder if we broke it because it’s not readable in their Windows PC…

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Always expect the unexpected

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well sadly i cant fix stupid :stuck_out_tongue: again i myself could handle such a plugin and as i said before i share the same concerns as Sam, just said that its not impossible if you added all the unique identifers such as serial number etc to the list of drives cause that is truly unique then if the user would erase if not preparing its their own bloody fault.

in any case the addon its not happening so we can all untwist the collective panties and wind down this discussion

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I don’t even care what this is replying too, this is the single best thing I will read on the internet today.
Congratulations sir, you are awesome. :+1: