I'm not a programmer but I'm hoping some talent is lurking out there that's interested in this:

Last night I was formatting some spare external drives. In a moment of total brain cramp I accidentally said "yes" to formatting my 500gb live storage drive! The drive I was formatting failed so I clicked to try again and didn't notice that the "bad" drive was no longer the one selected, my live drive was! So Data Rescue II is running to see what I can get back. If I get data back I guess it will be my early Christmas present!

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has made this mistake. But it's one that could be blocked by a patch to the Disk Utility package. What if all drives were "protected" by default? Have a check box that must be unchecked before letting a format/erase/partition proceed. Not just a warning dialog. If the box is checked then the buttons would not work. That way doing a format/erase/partition would require unchecking a box & agreeing to a dialog. While not totally idiot proof it would make it harder to make my mistake. There could also be an "advanced user" function that removes the checks by default instead of manually one at a time.

Anyone got an idea how to implement something like this?

thats why you should READ carefully