DriveSetup does not change partition type when reformatting existing partition

[mr-victory]

When DriveSetup is used to format a partition with a different filesystem than the partition contains, DriveSetup does not update the type of the partition according to the new filesystem. The partition type I mention is a hardcoded value either in MBR or GPT. There is a similar ticket mentioning this issue: ticket:4467 . This issue does not affect the bootability of Haiku.

To reproduce this issue:

1. Create a partition and set a type. In the screenshot (partition "test") I chose "Windows Data".
2. Create a filesystem matching the partition type. I chose NTFS.
3. Reformat with a different filesystem. I chose BFS.

The result is a BFS formatted partition with type "Windows Data", the filesystem type and partition type are in conflict. I tested with partitions on MBR, GPT and different filesystems, problem always appears. I used hrev55216 x86_64 to test.

[madmax]

update the type of the partition according to the new filesystem

There's no such thing. While a BFS filesystem in a Windows data partition is confusing, that's the behaviour I expect. I guess even Windows would accept it with a BFS driver installed. Take the partition type as a hint of the kind of content (not format) it has. The format of the filesystem, though sometimes related, is a completely different thing. Formatting tools don't change the partition type (in general; I don't claim to know what all of them do).

Now, maybe a very high level partition/format app with very few options should get rid of those technicalities and just present the user one concept with a short list of common choices. But that's asking for a design change, not a bug fix.

[mr-victory]

The approach of not touching the partition type is very interesting...

High end tools that I know (diskmgmt.msc, GParted) which are aware of partitions and filesystems set the partition type accordingly when a partition is formatted. This is the default behavior.

Low end tools like fdisk cam also change the partition type but cannot format the partition because they do not know what a filesystem is! After using a tool like fdisk, (under Linux) usually a mkfs.<filesystem-type> utility is used which formats the given device but does not know what a partition is.

DriveSetup can work with both partitions and filesystems so I expected it to take care of the partition type. If the intended behaviour is to not change the partition type, then I requested for a change.

I tried changing an existing Haiku/BFS partition's type to NTFS and booting Windows 10 on real hardware without drivers for BFS. The partition was assigned a drive letter and the filesystem type showed up as RAW (unformatted) on diskmgmt.msc. I also have BTRFS partitions on the hard drive and they do not have a drive letter. Then I could boot to Haiku without any problems.

[tqh]

At least for GPT changing the partition type would be very good. Don't know enough about MBR to say if also should be done there. So I agree that we should do it.

[madmax]

Replying to tqh:

At least for GPT changing the partition type would be very good. Don't know enough about MBR to say if also should be done there.

If there's an obvious mapping, I guess the least surprise path would be to do it whatever the partitioning scheme is, and maybe not even tell the user about partition types if possible.

[X512]

I think that creating and formatting partitions should be done as one atomic operation. It is less confusing and fixes many things.