Bug 150744

Summary: Installer should not format external drives
Product: [openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1 Reporter: Marcel Hilzinger <marcel>
Component: InstallationAssignee: Thomas Fehr <fehr>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact: Klaus Kämpf <kkaempf>
Severity: Enhancement    
Priority: P5 - None CC: suse-beta
Version: Beta 3   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: Other   
Whiteboard:
Found By: Other Services Priority:
Business Priority: Blocker: ---
Marketing QA Status: --- IT Deployment: ---

Description Marcel Hilzinger 2006-02-14 10:58:44 UTC
If Yast finds /dev/hda and /dev/sda, then it will install (and format, if neccessary) SL on /dev/sda. This can result in data loss for external USB- and Firewiredrives.

Please do a check, if /dev/sda is an usb-storage or ohci1394 device, befor suggesting to format the disk.
Comment 1 Michael Gross 2006-02-14 12:04:14 UTC
Thomas: This really would make sense for an enhancement, internal drives should take preference. I'm not sure if this would affect only the partitioner...?
Comment 2 Andreas Kleen 2006-02-14 12:52:43 UTC
In my humble opinion, it's not an enhancement - it's a major bug.
A friend of me lost a whole external backup disk completely when Windows just formatted it when he tried to reinstall it. It would be really good to not have that problem in suse.
Comment 3 Michael Gross 2006-02-14 13:03:56 UTC
Well... its never bad if people know what they are doing, specially when formatting harddisks - that's why everything is shown up in a summary (with large red letters in that case). So this is no major bug, but an enhancement in my opinion. In that fashion, the next one could complain that his internal disk was formatted... YaST is only making a proposal here, I can impress with Microsoft the user would not even see what's happening but a funny animation on the screen while his data is getting exiled ;)
Comment 4 Marcel Hilzinger 2006-02-14 13:10:33 UTC
As many systems are not able to boot from an USB-disk (I don't even know, if YaST can install on it...), I consider it as a clear bug. YaST should not suggest a non working solution, that's all.
Comment 5 Christian Boltz 2006-02-17 20:54:35 UTC
If I get it right, there's no open question to Marcel here - so this bug shouldn't be in NEEDINFO state...
Comment 6 Michael Gross 2006-02-17 21:01:26 UTC
I'm setting bugs which contain no new comments to NEED on order to handle them better on my listings. So I'd appreciate it if you would not change the setting without providing something useful - thanks.

The issue adressed in this report is furthermore adressed in another bug as the partitioner in Beta4 is generally kind of broken.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 151947 ***
Comment 7 Andreas Kleen 2006-02-17 21:10:25 UTC
I disagree that this issue is covered in 151947. That bug talks about
completely different things.

Comment 8 Michael Gross 2006-02-17 21:53:29 UTC
OK we can let this one go its way seperately. There was a related issue about hotplugging devices during the installation falsifying the later fstab, but I cannot find the bug right now.
Comment 9 Thomas Fehr 2006-03-13 12:44:13 UTC
I can do things different for external drives as soon as hwinfo is telling
me which drive is external and which one is internal. As long as I do not have
this information I see no way to do what is requested. (and no, I will not add
code that decides about external/internal drives based on the bus type, since
this is not reliable).
Comment 10 Steffen Winterfeldt 2006-03-14 11:58:42 UTC
hwinfo 12.13 sets a 'hotpluggable' flag: (hd_t *)->is.hotpluggable
Comment 11 Thomas Fehr 2006-03-14 12:23:36 UTC
Ok, will honour that after 10.1.
Comment 12 Thomas Fehr 2006-07-13 11:35:13 UTC
Reopen for work in SL 10.2
Comment 13 Thomas Fehr 2006-07-31 14:45:03 UTC
Proposal tries now to avoid suggestion of hotpluggable disks for instalation.