I'm working on adapting Anaconda for PLD Linux and have found the following problem (will try to send a patch with some refactoring to allow us to use unpatched Anaconda):

When enumerating devices, Anaconda properly finds the clean disk as /dev/sda. As the disk is new, straight from the factory, it contains all zeroes and thus there is no partition table present.

Later on it seems to do some checks in the code and discards the disk (probably assuming it doesn't support partitioning and thus is useless for installation).

The same thing happens in VirtualBox with a fresh disk image.

The user is forced to launch GParted, create an empty MSDOS partition table, write changes and restart Anaconda.

I'm using a recent version (two days old) of the current git head.