From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.2-2 i686) [I recently posted this on the seawolf list. I was told to repost here] The redhat installer many times will offer the user 'click here to retry' dialog, but no 'cancel installation' choice! It's the age old '(R)etry, (A)bort, (C)ancel', guys come on, even DOS got that right :)! The user is forced to do a hard reboot because the gui sometimes keeps keyboard input even if you switch to another virtual terminal. I got this when the installer reported it could not read from the cd rom, but it turns out by the way, it was not the cd rom but a disk error. The problem got worst because after the hard reboot I had to fsck manually. Having a cancel option included would have prevented this. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.? 2. 3. Actual Results: I don't know exactly what caused the error, but the installer complained about the cdrom media (my media and drive was fine) then asked me to retry without giving me the option to cancel. I was upgrading 6.2->7.1 Expected Results: I not to bad rule of thumb is would be, on any dialog with a "retry" option, there should also be an "abort" or "cancel" option
You can always press <Ctrl><Alt><Del> to reboot the machine. This should exit the installer cleanly so that you should not have to fsck after reboot. But I understand your point. I'll mark this as a request for enhancement.
What I had to do to finish the installation without rebooting was to switch to another VT (alt-F2 for example) and unmount the CD drive. (umount /mnt/source) I then remounted it (mount /dev/hdc /mnt/source) switched back to the correct VT for the installer and pressed "retry". This allowed the installer to read the package that it was complaining about and continue.
I think that there's some merit to this request, but I think it's a pretty low priority on our long to-do list.