Following an Ars Technica guide to create a Windows to Go USB stick I used diskpart for the first time today. Diskpart is a command line tool used to meddle with your with partitions and the MBR and such on your drives. If you don't know what this means the short of it is that it is a set of handy functions that can totally trash your computer if you do the wrong thing. It's a command line tool, so hopefully nobody is going to stumble over it by accident (command lines not being all that supportive of exploration, or provide much information 'scent').
Have a look at this screenshot:
There are two main problems here, one with a lack of system status information, the other a lack of a confirmation prompt before you wipe your drive clean (or do something over fairly difficult to recover from). The former issue means that you might get muddled or lose track of the drive you've selected, or accidently select the wrong drive and not notice. On the plus side there is a feedback message, and it does persist on the screen. Even so you that text could have scrolled off-screen by the time you get around to doing something terminal. It's also an important design principle to provide a confirmation prompt prior to doing something irreversible, or something generally not abortable (even just things that could tie up your computer resources for a long while).
One quick fix here is when you select a disk to include that information in the command line prefix. So once you select 'Disk 2' the command line prefix goes from:
Have a look at this screenshot:
There are two main problems here, one with a lack of system status information, the other a lack of a confirmation prompt before you wipe your drive clean (or do something over fairly difficult to recover from). The former issue means that you might get muddled or lose track of the drive you've selected, or accidently select the wrong drive and not notice. On the plus side there is a feedback message, and it does persist on the screen. Even so you that text could have scrolled off-screen by the time you get around to doing something terminal. It's also an important design principle to provide a confirmation prompt prior to doing something irreversible, or something generally not abortable (even just things that could tie up your computer resources for a long while).
One quick fix here is when you select a disk to include that information in the command line prefix. So once you select 'Disk 2' the command line prefix goes from:
- DISKPART >
to:
- DISKPART DISK 2 >
A nice handy reminder and indication of what drive you're currently meddling with. Even better if the utility could make use of the drive labels and/or give some indication of the drive type.
No comments:
Post a Comment