lethal adventures in f18 alpha

[Adam Williamson]

On 2012-09-14 22:29, cornel panceac wrote:
> being tired of the dracut selinux infinite loop, i've decided this
> morning to reinstall f18 from f18 x86 netinst disc. all attempts to
> boot with standard options failed with a kernel crash (maybe my video
> card is broken). i eventually managed to reach anaconda by booting in
> safe graphics mode. there, i've completed the steps required (what is
> the target device, what software, time zone) then pressed continue.
> then, i've been hit by this:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=857607 [1] . I've seen
> this before on same system in the previous 5 (?) years so that was 
> not
> a big surprise. a big surprise was that after i reboot, something
> messed my existing linux partitions (actually one of them is 
> missing).
> what do i mean by 'messed'? well, first, grub2 fails to load a menu
> saying that "no such partition" and offers a grub shell. then, in f17
> rescue mode, the system complains that i have no linux partitions.
> going to rescue mode's shell, the partitions are marked "Linux", but
> the last one (#7) is missing. then i booted system rescue cd. there,
> mount /dev/sdb{1,5,7} /mnt/mountpoint ended with something similar to
> "broken ntfs signature". adding -t ext3 in the mix didn't help, error
> was something like "bad superblock etc".
>  THIS is something i don't remember to have ever seen on fedora
> (alpha, beta or final).

You need to say what layout you had on the disk(s) previously, and what 
options you chose during install. It's impossible to know what happened. 
It's possible you simply hit this:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=855976

Remember, this is an *Alpha*. You shouldn't deploy an Alpha of anything 
to any system you can't bear to lose. We do warn about this, regularly. 
You're also installing the Alpha before it's even been announced; I'm 
aiming to ensure this issue and other major ones in Alpha are explained 
in the release announcement when we release it, but we haven't, yet.

> from personal experience, i believe something is deeply wrong in the
> anaconda logic. and of course, the back and forth mess is also a
> problem. why not just continue to the next required step, with back
> being an option, and at the end present a summary of completed and
> incompleted steps, if any?

That isn't the design. There aren't steps that you go through one by 
one. The design is referred to as 'hub and spoke'. There is a main 
screen - the hub - and several spokes, some of which are optional, and 
which you can complete in any order, and which you can revisit any 
number of times, and which may potentially affect each other. The 
hub/spoke design was considered a better reflection of the capabilities 
of anaconda than the wizard-ish design.

> btw, on systems with many hard disks (at least 2), if linux/anaconda
> is unable to tell which is the first hard disk system will boot, why
> not install grub on all hard disk, just to be sure?

That's a horrible idea...

Bootloader installation selection is something else which isn't 
entirely implemented in newUI yet. But we certainly don't want to go 
around automatically squelching whatever's in the MBR of every single 
disk on the system. That certainly would be bad behaviour. And 'lethal'.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net