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

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 01:56:11PM -0300, Eduardo Habkost wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 05:49:51PM +0100, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Couldn't virt-install initialize an empty partition table on the disk
> image before launching the guest? It would probably make many OS
> installers happier.

No, its not that simple. We can't know what partition table the guest
OS prefers, nor is it practical for non-raw disk formats. We could
trivially pass a flag to anaconda on its boot command line to tell it
to initialize the guest, but anaconda devs rejected this useful idea
as too complicated to implement. Go figure. 


Daniel
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