On 19/07/2026 at 21:04, Kevin Locke wrote:
I can confirm that the ISO from Salsa CI does not produce the
"Partition(s) 1 on /dev/sda have been written, but [...]" error
message. However, it does still overwrite the USB stick. Is that
expected?
Yes. The netboot installer included in mini.iso images does not mount a
local installation media, it loads everything from a network mirror. To
simulate the cdrom installer included in netinst and DVD images, you
need to mount the installation media by hand.
Note: when a isohybrid image is written to a USB drive /dev/sdX, the
cdrom installer mounts the partition /dev/sdX1 instead of the entire
device /dev/sdX (because it scans USB partitions before entire disks, do
not ask me why). So you also need to test with a mounted partition.
One other idea we haven't discussed, which might be helpful to
distinguish the use cases you outlined from missing disks, would be to
prompt the user to modify the installer media. For example:
I also had this idea as a last resort.
"No disks were detected other than the one containing this installer.
Installing to this disk will modify the installer media. Continue?"
Prompting only when there is no other disk would break the use case
where there is another disk and the user still wants to install on the
disk containing installation media. IMO it should not matter whether
there are other disks or not.
