Is gnome-disks really incapable of dealing with a blank drive?

[Tom Horsley]

I popped in my new 4TB drive yesterday and tried to use
gnome-disks to create a giant ext4 partition.

I couldn't find any option anywhere to create partitions,
I only found options to format, so I figured that would
implicitly create the partitions.

But no, it formatted /dev/sdc as an ext4 filesystem
(NOT /dev/sdc1).

Am I missing something, or is the gnome-disks utility
really this useless?

I eventually wrote a few megabytes of zeroes over the
top of it then used gparted instead to create a new
gpt partition table and make /dev/sdc1 (finally) an
ext4 partition.

[Michael Cronenworth]

On 03/14/2013 07:02 AM, Tom Horsley wrote:
> Am I missing something, or is the gnome-disks utility
> really this useless?

At the top right of the program (to the right of your hard drive name)
there is a button with two gears. Click on "Format Disk..." to partition.

[Tom Horsley]

On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 08:52:37 -0500
Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> At the top right of the program (to the right of your hard drive name)
> there is a button with two gears. Click on "Format Disk..." to partition.

By golly that works (since I hadn't put anything on the disk yet,
I wiped it so I could try again). It is unfortunate that it uses
the same gear icon as the one below the picture in the middle of the
screen yet does complete different operations :-).

[Junk]

On 14 Mar 2013, at 23:22, Tom Horsley  wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Mar 2013 08:52:37 -0500
> Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> > At the top right of the program (to the right of your hard drive name)
> > there is a button with two gears. Click on "Format Disk..." to partition.
>
> By golly that works (since I hadn't put anything on the disk yet,
> I wiped it so I could try again). It is unfortunate that it uses
> the same gear icon as the one below the picture in the middle of the
> screen yet does complete different operations :-).
> --

I think the workflow is: above the diagram is whole disk informations and operation, below the diagram is partition information and operation.

Junk

[Olav Vitters]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 07:22:47PM -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> By golly that works (since I hadn't put anything on the disk yet,
> I wiped it so I could try again). It is unfortunate that it uses
> the same gear icon as the one below the picture in the middle of the
> screen yet does complete different operations :-).

If you want, please file a bug at bugzilla.gnome.org that the UI is
confusing.