Comment 18 for bug 484252

I'm surprised that this has not been fixed. It has been a problem for several Ubuntu releases, long before the Lucid freeze - and it is destroying peoples' data.

I think the idea of greying out the format button when a partition rather than a device is selected is a good one. This caters for people who want a simple way to get a usb stick ready for Ubuntu, and anyone who wants to just format a partition most likely knows how to do it in other ways.

Also I think that asking the user to confirm their selection and that they do indeed want to erase the entire device is an absolute must. With the confirmation message, showing the size of the device with other identifying information would help too. Then for example, if a user accidentally selects a usb hard drive rather than a stick, they are more likely to realise.