Fresh new laptop with completely blank hard drive, nothing in the primary boot record. Booted off of the usb-storage device with x86_64 written with diskboot.img and installed Fedora 7 Test2. During install I clicked "Ignore" (not "Format") when it asked about /dev/sdb twice before partitioning. Install succeeded onto /dev/sda succeeded. I removed the USB storage device. It failed to boot, saying the PBR is invalid. Puzzled, I attempted to boot from the USB device again. But this time instead of showing me the syslinux menu, it showed me the grub menu with the kernel on /dev/sda. Two Issues ========== 1. It might be best if Anaconda knows which disk it booted bootdisk.img from, and completely ignore that during install? (Don't ask me if I want to format that disk.) 2. It seems that grub installed itself onto the wrong disk.
Welcome to the world of PC bioses sucking. Given that you booted off of the USB device, we're led to believe that it's 0x80 to the BIOS. So we want to boot off of it. I'm not sure what to do about this when we want to allow installing to USB hard drives :-/ Maybe we need to add a simple "install bootloader to this drive" on the first auto-partitioning screen that gets used if you do autopartitioning. Sticking on FC7Target for now so that we think about it some more for F7 at least.
Fixed in rawhide. On the partitioning screen, there is a combo box with a label "What drive would you like to boot this installation from?" and you can select the boot disk that way.