cautionary tale: wiped wrong disk because of swapped device names.

[midgethoen]

Not sure where to share this, but im hoping i can prevent some future idiot like myself from having a headache...

the story:

• messing around with nixos because i want to learn
• lets use disko. why not
• immediatly set up using luks
• some reboots later: cant unlock luks
• cleverly decides to reformat and reinstall using same disk-config.nix
• random luks ulocking problems persist
• ...fastforward to now...
• discovers ive likely formatted other (windows) nvme, because /dev/nvme0 /dev/nvme1 are non-deterministic....

blargh!

I dont expect any sympathy, its clasic fafo, but maybe a small mention would be helpfull to someone else. im willing to make PR but im currently still trying to reproduce wether or not the initial luks unlocking problem was because systemd-boot was looking at the wrong drive, causing me to attempt reinstall. but this is new to me, so any quick pointers are welcome.

cheers

[midgethoen]

after paying closer attention i noticed the luks unlocking prompt referencing: /dev/disk/by-partlabel/disk-main-luks
so it seems unlikely this didnt work due to non-deterministic initialization of disk names.

However i was able to reproduce the drive names swapping after multible live-usb boots.
what most likely happened:

• i had trouble unlocking luks at boot time bucause of thick fingers
• decided to try using live-usb
• this didnt work because the names swapped
• decided to reinstall using same disk-config.nix
• poof!

[midgethoen]

I should have probably used /dev/by-id/nvme-* for my machine. would it be helpfull to mention this or just the fact that device names are not deterministic in the quickstart? or would that be noise considering my scenario is probably quite rare.