Image Writer

Proposal regarding target choice-box

Asked by Peter

If I insert a SD-card (containing a EFI boot image and a ext4) in my reader, Win32 Disk Imager gives me no choice except the letter "D" that was assigned to the boot image (as it is a FAT32 one).

According to https://answers.launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+question/263697 , Disk Imager nevertheless always uses the complete drive, not a single partition. Like, when using dd under linux, using "if=sdx" and not eg. "if=sdx1".

Please make this clearer in the GUI. The drive letter misleads the occasional, but aware user. Nevertheless, using drive letters for this purpose seems to be very useful in an Windows environment, but it should clearly mentioned like "drive containing volume D:" instead of just plain "[D:\]". I've not tested the following case, but when there are multiple drive letters due to multiple Windows-known partitions, this should be clearly lead to have only one choice like eg. "drive containing volume D: & E:"

I'm using a german environment, hence Disk Imager uses a roughly translated GUI. The choice-box is labeled "Datenträger". Despite wrong in a strict sense, in general casual language this may understood like "volume", especially if there are drive letters shown. (There are many volumes if there are many partitions on a drive.) This also made me think that the program is dealing with partitions, not with drives.

Anyway, thanks for this program. Its useful once your know what it does.

Regards, Peter

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Answered
For:
Image Writer Edit question
Assignee:
Tobin Davis Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Tobin Davis (gruemaster) said : 		#1

Let's see if I can answer some of your questions here.

Physical drives with multiple partitions 'should' only show the first Windows recognizable partition letter (D in your case). Windows doesn't recognize most partition types, only DOS/Windows derived partitions (fat, ntfs). I do need to test this to make sure it only shows one drive entry, maybe with a list of recognized partitions. Consider that a feature request. I think there is already a request to show the physical drive size, to help make it easier for people to understand. When the program was first developed, (iirc) 4G was the norm for USB/SD, and 16G were premium. Now they have 128G, 156G, and getting bigger.

Blame Microsoft for using drive letters. I'm a Linux developer most of the time, and everything there is a file (drives & partitions, memory, etc).

As to the German translation, a friend and former coworker did the translation. As he was from Germany, I assumed it was accurate. Please feel free to make adjustments and submit to the sourceforge project for inclusion. All non-English translations were contributed by users, and are attributed accordingly.

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