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There was once was an operating systems that allowed you to format your entire hard drive when you only intended to format a floppy disk, if you typed format c:
by jtlienwis 6y ago
There was once was an operating systems that allowed you to format your entire hard drive when you only intended to format a floppy disk, if you typed format c: instead of format a:. This was called Microsoft Dos 2.x.
- ztjio 6y agoSo it did exactly what you requested it to do, no surprises at all. Got it.
- rmtech 6y agoYeah but there should be a SERIOUS warning preventing that
- Symbiote 6y agomkfs.vfat /dev/sda1 That's not that much different from a plausible error on Linux, with a USB drive and a hard drive. (At least, the man page for my mkfs.vfat doesn't include any options suggesting it protects against formatting already-formatted or mounted filesystems.)
- Dylan16807 6y agoYikes, it sure doesn't. For comparison, mkfs.ext2 asks before proceeding if there's already a filesystem, and outright exits if it's mounted.
- Symbiote 6y agoFair enough -- I was assuming based on the lack of documented "force" options that other mkfs' (mkfs.ext4 etc) have.
- gpm 6y agodd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/wrong_disk Killed a windows install (which had the first partition on the disk) only a year ago with that one.
- ryall 6y agoI lost about 5 hours work by getting the order of input/output parameters wrong in a tar command. No warnings, nothing. "Yes by all means, use a nonexistent file as input to overwrite an existing file That doesn't even have a .tar extension. That's exactly what I wanted"