Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 76638
RFE: _Always_ offer to make a boot disk
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:47:55 EDT
In doing install and upgrades, sometimes a grub/lilo setup will fail -- I have such a case where multiple SCSI controller drivers need to be appended to the mkinitrd, and that is not always picked up cleanly. Unfortunately it is often not possible to see this until after the end of the anaconda process. In such a case, a recovery approach is to 'upgrade' an already completely current box. As such, no new kernel is installed, and the flag to offer to make a boot disk is not set. ---------------- I propose that EVERY anaconda session always default to offering the book floppy option, even if (under current approach) it is not 'needed'. This permits another avenue for a clean recovery in the event of problems. The impact of doing so to existing installs/upgrades is nil, because it is, in such instances, asking anyway.
Unless I'm really confused I'm pretty sure we always ask the user to make a boot floppy.
Nope: 1. Build a minimum RHL 7.3 box on SCSI hardware 2. Update (text) to RHL 8.0 by CD 3. Throw away the first floppy, simulating a failed floppy write 4. Using the CD, 'update' again, and it does not ask for the floppy create
Jeremy is this because we did not write out a bootloader config the second time he did an upgrade?
I don't see any way in which we could be skipping the boot disk stage on an upgrade, even if no kernel is being installed. Additionally, I can't reproduce it here (just got asked to create a boot disk on an upgraded to 8.0 -> 8.0 upgrade). Mike, it would be reasonable to have this as one of the things we want to do with rescue mode, though.
hmmm ... It was asking me in my experience -- perhaps it is sensitive to vertion, and prior lilo.con presence -- I'll narrow down a bit and post details.
Not an enhancement, reclassifying.
I can't see anyway in our current code for this not to happen (except in the case of not having a floppy drive, but there's not much I can do there)