Bug 75147

Summary:	need to skip asking for boot disk creation when no floppy exists
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Tom Wood <woodt>
Component:	anaconda	Assignee:	Michael Fulbright <msf>
Status:	CLOSED RAWHIDE	QA Contact:	Mike McLean <mikem>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	8.0	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2003-07-09 05:00:13 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Tom Wood 2002-10-04 19:52:33 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020830

Description of problem:
anaconda shouldn't even ask about creating a boot disk when there's no
floppy/zip/ls100 in the machine.  Answering "yes" could ruin a newbie's day.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Install RHL.
2.Answer yes to create boot disk when you don't have a drive.
3.Sit in amazement as the install hangs ad nauseum.
	

Actual Results:  The system will hang.

Expected Results:  anaconda shouldn't even ask.

Additional info:

If I were a n00b, I'd be really disgusted that I'd gone through all that package
selection only to see my install hang.  Since I'm not a n00b but just plain old
st00pid, I worked around this with deft use of <ctrl-alt-f something or another>
and a well-placed kill -9.

Maybe by 8.1 I won't be able to shoot myself in the foot anymore...

Comment 1 Jeremy Katz 2002-10-07 15:18:12 UTC

Unfortunately, you can't really tell with any degree of certainty that there's
*not* a floppy drive connected on an x86 machine.  Even on machines without a
drive, the controller usually shows up and masquerades that a floppy is present.
 We'll try to make it more clear, though

Comment 2 Tom Wood 2002-10-07 17:47:07 UTC

Understood. Quote from linux/kernel/i386/i8259.c:

* Careful.. Not only is IRQ13 unreliable, but it is also
* leads to races. IBM designers who came up with it should
* be shot.

Now, if there were just some way to kill off an errant request to create a boot
disk that's user-friendly, we'd be better off than we are now...

Comment 3 Jeremy Katz 2003-07-09 05:00:13 UTC

We skip asking if we can't detect a floppy with kudzu now.

Comment 4 Tom Wood 2003-07-12 00:51:44 UTC

Wonderful - thank you.  Got a lot of machines now w/o floppies.