Description of problem: I intended to install Fedora-7-i386 onto an external USB2 hard drive attached to a laptop running Windows Vista on a new Sony VAIO laptop. During the install it asked me which drives to use. I unchecked sda. I double, triple, and quadruple checked it. I didn't want anything to touch sda. Everything looked good and the install proceeded as normal. I configured the BIOS to boot the USB2 first if attached and then the internal HD. Everything worked when the machine booted up off of the USB2 drive. I removed the USB drive and rebooted the laptop expecting to see Vista. I got a GRUB prompt instead. And then it hung. Apparently anaconda installed the MBR onto sda anyway. I booted the F7 install DVD on another machine and noticed that only under the advanced options does it let me specify where to put the MBR. This violates the principle of least surprise, to say the least. The second stage GRUB and everything else got installed onto the removable device and the MBR went onto the internal HD. This is a useless configuration. Once you have wiped out the Vista MBR it is near impossible to replace. Gone are the days when you can just do fdisk /mbr. Supposedly you can run bootsect.exe from the install media but this laptop didn't come with install media as so many don't. I managed to get a copy from a friend and I got "Access denied" trying to run it even with administrator rights. We even tried restoring the whole OS from the recovery partition which didn't restore the MBR. So yeah, it sucks. Did I mention this was my gf's laptop which I just trashed? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): F7 How reproducible: Very. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot F7 installed with external USB2 device 2. Uncheck sda leaving sdb checked for the install 3. After the install notice that you have an unusable bootload setup Actual results: GRUB is installed on sda. Stage two installed on SDB. You can't get into Vista. Expected results: GRUB installed only on sdb. sda is completely untouched. When booted off of sda via BIOS Vista boots. When booted off of sdb F7 boots. Additional info:
I think the title of the report should be "Bootloader gets installed to MBR in sda despite unchecking sda as a disk to install". I can confirm the exact same problem occurred during installing FC7 to an external USB 2.0 drive. During installation (based on the custom partitioning option), I unchecked sda and also selected the option for not installing bootloader. Basically, I did not want the FC7 installer to install *any* bootloader. When the installer went to the next step, I noticed that it had automatically selected sda for installing bootloader again. I unchecked it again and that avoided the trouble that the original reporter faced. However, I need to verify that my laptop still boots to MS windows!
There is a new warning when "What drive would you like to boot this installation from?" is set to disallowed drive now in rawhide and the bug considering this combobox is fixed also. (see #243556).