[fedora-virt] "YOU WILL LOSE ALL DATA ON THIS DRIVE", but the drive is wrong.

[Mark McLoughlin]

On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 18:28 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> from earlier, i'm test installing a f11 beta x86_64 guest on a f11
> beta x86_64 host, and i got to the warning dialog:
> 
> Error processing drive sda.
> Maybe it needs to be
> reinitialized.  YOU WILL LOSE ALL
> DATA ON THIS DRIVE!
> 
>   i can see from this BZ report:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=492082
> 
> i'm assuming, from what i read there, that this is a normal event and
> that, for a new (blank) disk image, one should do the initialization,
> right?

Yes. It really sucks that we can't remove this warning for this case -
every single user who creates a virtual machine will see it. And it is a
wholly terrifying dialog.

>   my only concern is that *my* warning refers to drive "sda" whereas,
> if i click on the "Details" tab of this VM that i'm creating, it
> refers to a target device of "hda".  should those two device file
> designators not match?  because given that my host hard drive has the
> name "sda", i'm just a wee bit reluctant to click "Initialize" when it
> seems that virt-manager is confused about what its own hard drive is.

Computers suck.

virt-manager says "hda" because we're giving the guest an IDE disk.

anaconda says "sda" because the Linux SCSI layer is now used for IDE
disks.

IMHO "sda" and "hda" are meaningless and have no place in a GUI, but ...

Cheers,
Mark.