posted by elwood on Mon 30th Nov 2009 09:43
Hi there, Is there an operating system that allows to completely format its partition while it is running?
I know one that can do it. Check this video of AmigaOS 4.1:
Wiping AmigaOS while it's still running: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUoArmgzz_A
(@Site admin, there seems to be a bug in your "link" tag)
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that would require the system to run entirely from the ram so either loading a small subset of tool and running the system form the ramdrive (which can be done with linux or embedded system, so they don't actually format the disk they are running from, only the disk they are loading from, (and rebuilding the archive they are loading from).
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To change the filesystem used on the partition as shown on the video.
This is often used while testing filesystems for instance.
There are easier ways to test filesystems.
And I can't imagine you'd want to change a root filesystem all that often (if indeed ever) unless you were testing filesystems
Note that I don't need any USB, CD, whatever to rebuild the system. Using these would be so slow!!!
In theory you're right, but in practice what you suggest wouldn't work in the real world.
OSs are more than just kernels - they're whole packages of software and some of which isn't installed by default.
To do what you're suggesting, you'd have to have set up files, vanilla config files and even the apps you don't want installed still installed on the HDD just in case the user wanted to do a hot-format.
Then you've got to hope to god that the user has more RAM than the sum of the total of all the installed files as you've got nowhere to swap the data should the RAM not be large enough to hold the entire install medium plus running install suite.
So I reiterate my original point: I can't see why anyone would want to do a hot-format.
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