Hey,
> Does Parted provide a way to tell whether a storage device is read-only? > That would be ideal. Yes it does, but this is not enough for a reliable installation device detection. In Qemu the installation device is /dev/sr0 that is reported as read-only by parted. Using real hardware, and an installation device on an USB drive, the installation device is /dev/sd* and is not reported as read-only by parted. However, I found a better way to detect the installation device, that relies on reading the root partition UUID from the command line. I combined the read-only parted method and the UUID based installation device detection in e12be802e02b3345a753e7ec1287852a7337a0a5. This seems to work well for all my machines, plus for your VM use case. Closing this one, Thanks, Mathieu
