On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 4:59 PM, Chris Murphy <lists@colorremedies.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 2, 2016 at 9:05 AM, Matthew Miller <mattdm@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, May 02, 2016 at 11:36:24AM +0200, Martin Bříza wrote:
>>> I chose "factory settings" because usually when you get a new flash
>>> drive, it's FAT formatted. While this is a big simplification, I
>>> thought it would be a good one for a user who is not very technically
>>> savvy - because that's the person who would be using the tool. Of
>>> course, I'm open to discussion about nearly anything regarding FMW so
>>> if there is a general consensus we should rewrite some strings inside
>>> the app, I'll be glad to do so.
>>>
>>> So if you guys agree "reformatting" would be a better choice, I'll
>>> go ahead and change the text.
>>
>> I guess my inclination would be to just drop this feature entirely. If
>> people want to reformat the drive, they can use whatever regular OS
>> feature to do it. This doesn't need to be a general-purpose drive
>> utility.
>
> The purpose of that feature is to deal with some utilities and OS's
> that get confused about the distinctly non-standard partition
> arrangement on the stick and can't fix it themselves.
>
> Certainly on OS X, while it can be fixed by manually finding the less
> obvious partition option and changing it to 1 partition, most users
> just want to erase it. But for erasing, three partitions show up in
> Disk Utility, and all partitions are far less than the size of the
> stick. So the appearance is that the USB stick is permanently shrunk
> in a busted way.

I just tried this on OS X 10.11.4, which is the latest version and has a totally different UI in Disk Utility that's the opposite of past Disk Utilities. Erase in fact creates a new single partition and new file system, so the stick works fine. Meanwhile the partitioning UI is really a shrink/grow UI and it gets things totally wrong and confused.

Older versions, you were stuck having to go to partition UI and know to change the popup from Current partition scheme to 1 partition, then click erase.


--
Chris Murphy