Bug 1328498

Proposing as a Beta blocker, based on this criterion:
"Release-blocking live and dedicated installer images must boot when written to optical media of an appropriate size (if applicable) and when written to a USB stick with any of the officially supported methods."
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_24_Beta_Release_Criteria#Release-blocking_images_must_boot

When there is a high chance that the image written will be corrupted, it can't be considered as a functional writing tool. I have demonstrated that it is quite easy to end up with an unbootable usb stick. Also, when you look at gnome-disks for comparison (which also does a dd-based copy), gnome-disks unmounts all the partitions before writing the image. If it fails to unmount some of the partitions, it announces the problem and does not allow the user to continue.

liveusb-creator-3.93.1-1.fc24 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 24. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-ff4136b90c

liveusb-creator-3.93.1-1.fc24 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 24. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-ff4136b90c

liveusb-creator-3.93.1-1.fc24 has been pushed to the Fedora 24 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for
instructions on how to install test updates.
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-ff4136b90c

This is partially fixed with liveusb-creator-3.93.1-1.fc24. The partitions are now unmounted before writing, which is great. But if the unmounting process fails for some reason (e.g. you have a terminal opened with cwd inside that mounted directory, iow the partition is being used), FMR doesn't mind and starts overwriting it. Instead, it should complain that the device/partitions is being used and can't be overwritten at the moment.

I see this in terminal, but it might not be related to this issue:

[creator:355] Overwriting device with live image
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/logging/__init__.py", line 853, in emit
    msg = self.format(record)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/logging/__init__.py", line 726, in format
    return fmt.format(record)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/logging/__init__.py", line 465, in format
    record.message = record.getMessage()
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/logging/__init__.py", line 329, in getMessage
    msg = msg % self.args
TypeError: not all arguments converted during string formatting
Logged from file creator.py, line 368

liveusb-creator-3.93.2-1.fc24 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 24. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-ff4136b90c

liveusb-creator-3.93.2-1.fc24 has been pushed to the Fedora 24 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for
instructions on how to install test updates.
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-ff4136b90c

Awesome, fixed in liveusb-creator-3.93.2-1.fc24 :-) LUC now presents an error in gui if the partitions can't be unmounted.

Well, there is still a minor problem. LUC reports that the "drive is in use" every time some partition is mounted, even if the partition gets unmounted fine. So right now, if you insert a flash drive and is automounted, the first time you click "Write to disk" you'll receive "drive is in use", and the second time you click on it, it starts writing. 100% reproducible.

So either there is a code sequence error:

  if mounted:
    print error
  unmount

instead of

  unmount
  if mounted:
    print error

or there is some race condition between unmounting finishing and LUC refreshing the mounted status.

(In reply to Kamil Páral from comment #10)
> Well, there is still a minor problem. LUC reports that the "drive is in use"
> every time some partition is mounted, even if the partition gets unmounted
> fine. 

The original problem has been fixed, so I decided to switch this bug report back to VERIFIED and report the new problem separately as bug 1329995.

Discussed at 2016-04-25 blocker review meeting: [1]. 

This bug was accepted as Beta blocker (solved in previous releases) and Freeze Exception: this violates "All release-blocking images must boot in their supported configurations." (with the footnote about USB media) for F22 and F23. we may also consider it serious enough to be an F24 Beta blocker if not pushed stable by go/no-go, but it is at least freeze exception-worthy for now

[1] http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-blocker-review/2016-02-29/f24-blocker-review.2016-04-25-17.02.html

liveusb-creator-3.93.3-1.fc24 has been submitted as an update to Fedora 24. https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-ff4136b90c

this was agreed as AcceptedPreviousRelease, fixing.

liveusb-creator-3.93.3-1.fc24 has been pushed to the Fedora 24 testing repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.
See https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:Updates_Testing for
instructions on how to install test updates.
You can provide feedback for this update here: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2016-ff4136b90c

liveusb-creator-3.93.3-1.fc24 has been pushed to the Fedora 24 stable repository. If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.

re-opening, still needs pushing for f22 and f23.

Created attachment 1151159 [details]
My description of problems encountered while testing the Fedora Writer.

I took snapshots about problems encountered as well as bugs encountered.

In addition areas for improvements were noted.

Cant have a subdirectory within the same directory as the iso file
The wrong home directory is not shown
Text is too small (6 or 7 pts).
Expanding the window does not expand the text.
dd command needs a sync call before "finished" is flashed onto the screen¯

Suitable dd command

dd if=path/to/iso/the.iso of=path/to/flashdrive bs=1M && sync

You may remove the bs=1M if you want to live with 512 byte buffers.

Created attachment 1151162 [details]
A better description of the attachement 1. Please set attachment 1 [details] aside.

The pdf file has improved comments.

The f22 and f23 builds were pushed, but this needs to stay open until the mirror manager stops offering older metadata, according to:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA:SOP_blocker_bug_process#Tracking_AcceptedPreviousRelease_blocker_bugs

Currently that is not the case:
$ ./track-previous-release-blocker.py liveusb-creator-3.93.3-1.fc23
INFO    Querying Koji for liveusb-creator-3.93.3-1.fc23 in f23-updates ...
INFO    Build liveusb-creator-3.93.3-1.fc23 was tagged into f23-updates at: 2016-04-26 16:44:31 UTC (1461689071.38)
INFO    Downloading metalink for updates-released-f23 ...
INFO    Metalink contains metadata with these timestamps:
        2016-04-24 20:30:33 UTC (1461529833.0)   ✘ older than pushed package
        2016-04-25 23:32:36 UTC (1461627156.0)   ✘ older than pushed package
        2016-04-26 20:26:11 UTC (1461702371.0)   ✔ sufficiently recent
WARNING ✘ FAILED Some metadata referenced in metalink is still older than the time when liveusb-creator-3.93.3-1.fc23 was tagged into f23-updates. Some users would not receive this update if they chose to update now.

And similar for fc22.

INFO    ✔ PASSED All metadata referenced in metalink is sufficiently newer than the time when liveusb-creator-3.93.3-1.fc23 was tagged into f23-updates. All users should be able to receive the update now.
INFO    ✔ PASSED All metadata referenced in metalink is sufficiently newer than the time when liveusb-creator-3.93.3-1.fc22 was tagged into f22-updates. All users should be able to receive the update now.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=1151162

This document is a print out of the multiple problems encountered with the actual item or it's successor.