Description of Problem: During an installation from scratch anaconda blows up suddenly after finishing two disks. The only trace I have from that is the following from syslog: ...... <4>hdc: tray open <4>end_request: I/O error, dev 16:00 (hdc), sector 1300864 If you cannot be bothered to write backtrace to logs then I cannot be bothered with paying attention to these. Floppies written by anaconda are unreadable.
Do the cds pass the media check?
Yes, they do. Sorry, should have mentioned that immediately but error logging and reporting in anaconda is driving me up the wall. Yes, I realize that this is not for everybody but keep in mind that for quite a big chunk of time a disk on which one is installing is already available as a place to save copies of logs and often are other options. Floppies in the context are _extremely_ frustrating and unreliable. And do not even think about propositions to copy Python backtraces from a screen by hand. As a matter of fact the same CD set was already used previously to install on another machine and I also used it to finish the whole installation without any further problems or incidents but also without anaconda. So I have now a test system roughly like it was originally intended but I had to finish the whole process more or less manually.
That doesn't answer the question of if mediacheck was used on the machine in question. There's a lot of variance in CD-ROM drives on reading CDs and if they don't pass the media check, I'm not putting money on being able to stream packages off the CD for long enough to do an install. As for saving tracebacks, it's entirely too late in the game to go about changing things there, but adding more complication to that code is *not* an ideal case. This is last ditch code for if we run into problems. Does it now need to analyze the problem to decide if writing a traceback to a hard drive is "safe"? It's very similar to the whole problem of "what do you do when the kernel crashes". Sure it might be safe to write to the disk sometimes, but how do you tell which times those are?
> That doesn't answer the question of if mediacheck was used on the machine in > question. Yes, it was. As well as further readings. Which does not exclude a possiblity of "temporary difficulties" for whatever reasons but even if so this is pretty poor excuse for anaconda to blow up; especially that late in the whole process after a significant expenditure of time on a part of an installing person.
We appreciate the time you have spent beta testing this codebase. However w/o further information we cannot reproduce the issue. We have not seen this failure in all of all install testing, which usually indicates a hardware problem versus a programming error in the vast majority of the time.