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Re: unclear cp semantics nuked non-working drive?
From: |
Andrew Clausen |
Subject: |
Re: unclear cp semantics nuked non-working drive? |
Date: |
Sun, 26 Nov 2000 16:49:30 +1100 |
address@hidden wrote:
> Parted is a nice and friendly tool, but I managed to distroy a
> partition using CP with GNU Parted 1.2.13.
Ouch!
> I was working on partitioning my hda drive, and wanted to cp a
> partition: /dev/hdb1 to /dev/hda1.
>
> Here's what I did:
>
> ~# parted /dev/hda
> (parted) help cp
> cp MINOR [DEVICE] MINOR copy filesystem to another partition
>
> MINOR is the partition number used by Linux. The primary
> partitions
> number from 1-4, and logical partitions are 5 onwards.
> DEVICE is usually /dev/hda or /dev/sda
>
> I wondered about the strange commandline for CP, why is only one
> DEVICE allowed?
Have a look at the "select" command...
> But I acknowledged that one device is enough; you
> only may need to specify another SOURCE device, as the destination
> device can clearly only be the one you're working on, ie, the one
> that was specified on the command line, in my case /dev/hda.
>
> So, to copy /dev/hdb1 to /dev/hda1 I did:
>
> (parted) cp 1 /dev/hdb 1
Ouch. You want:
(parted) select /dev/hdb
(parted) cp 1 /dev/hda 1
> but apparently, this copies /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdb1?
Correct.
> I have two strong suggestions:
>
> * it would be good (IMO), if parted would refuse (or at least warn
> before) to write to a disk that is not the ``working disk''.
Well, if you say /dev/hdb, or whatever, you are explicitly telling
it to write to another disk...
> (or, at least change the CP help to:
>
> cp FROM-MINOR [TO-DEVICE] TO-MINOR
I like this idea.
> which reflects the current semantics. But I think it's evil to
> write to a device that's not the working device...)
So, you think we should change it to:
cp [FROM-DEVICE] FROM-MINOR TO-MINOR
Any votes on this matter?
Thanks,
Andrew Clausen