F13 install problem (/dev/fd0 error)

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> writes:
> On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 21:45:13 -0500,
>   "Dale J. Chatham" <dale at chatham.org> wrote:
>> OK, I was an idiot.  I took about 20 minutes yesterday looking for a way 
>> to disable the floppy.  Today, it jumped out at me.
>> 
>> Doh!
>> 
>> I might suggest that timing out the attempt to query a floppy and moving 
>> on might be a wise for the developers to do :)
>
> It does time out. It's just a long time out.
> There are multiple bugs related to this issue. The current fix (not used
> in anaconda) is to not probe floppy controllers. This has the downside
> that floppy drives are detected at boot. In you know about modprode you
> can make it so your systems will get a working floppy on boot, but for
> "normal" users, this change is going to cause some confusion.
>
> Kyle had an idea about how to prevent the long timeouts for improperly
> configured or broken bios and still allow systems with floppy drives
> to have them detected at boot without doing anything special. I don't
> think this has been implemented yet though.

Are floppies still used by most people?  I can't recall the last time I
tried to use one.  If the floppy hardware is really so broken that it
causes hangs, wouldn't it be better to just not probe for them ever
unless some boot-time flag were given?

-wolfgang