GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 579266
MSDOS is misleading as a filesystem type when formatting disks
Last modified: 2009-10-24 20:33:18 UTC
When copying disks, you are prompted for the filesystem type to be applied to the new disk. The currently option for Windows is 'MSDOS', however this formats the disk as 'NTFS' (which is correct). Can the formatting option lable be changed from 'MSDOS' to 'NTFS'. Other information: None.
Thank you Nick for reporting this problem. My assumption is that when you copied to a new disk, there was not a partition table on the disk. To create partitions on a new disk, a partition table is required. Hence when you pasted a partition to the new disk, GParted popped up a dialog to "Create partition table on /dev/your-disk-device". The default partition table type is MSDOS. The partition that you pasted will retain the same file system as the original, e.g., NTFS. If the new disk had an existing partition table on it, then the dialog would not have been displayed. Does this sound like what happened?
Exactly what happened - it sounds like this is by design?
Yes this is the current design, but that does not mean that it can't be improved. Perhaps you have some ideas how to better handle the situation when an operation is to be performed on a hard disk device without a partition table?
To reduce confusion when creating a new partition or pasting a partition on a device with no partition table found, the following text will be displayed in a dialog box: No partition table found on device /path-to-device A partition table is required before partitions can be added. To create a new partition table choose the menu item: Device --> Create Partition Table. The user will not be automatically redirected to the Create Partition Table dialog with no explanation as to why this happened (as was done previously). This improvement in feedback has been committed to the git repository for inclusion in the next release of GParted (0.4.8). The relevant git commit can be found at: http://git.gnome.org/cgit/gparted/commit/?id=73471032c9dd2401f3155dd604260c7180f8238f Closing this bug.