Comment 7 for bug 484252

It was not unintentional, but I agree that the current UI is confusing in this matter. In Maverick, we should change the button label to "Wipe Disk" and change the description in the following dialog to note that this operation will clear the entire disk, not just the selected partition.

There are lots of USB disks with an additional small partition containing Windows software or drivers, but having multiple partitions that you care about is most certainly not the common case.

Simplicity is one of the design goals of usb-creator, and I really don't want to expose too much detail of partitioning when history has shown us (in ubiquity) that many users have a hard time understanding the concept. If the user wants to format specific partitions, they should use GParted or the KDE equivalent.

It's probably worth noting that non-destructive behavior is another design goal. Originally the format button only appeared when absolutely needed, but it quickly became apparent that too many users wanted to quickly clear a disk that they were no longer using and put Ubuntu on it. So if we're going to do something destructive, we should make sure that it's destructive enough to not require additional fiddling.