Fedora 42 installer (Anaconda) erases EFI partition of flash drive

[masin-wmde (Masin Wiedner)]

At work, we use Ventoy for our USB boot requirements. I noticed today that all our prepared boot sticks wouldn’t boot anymore. On investigation I found that Anaconda immediately deletes the VTOYEFI partition when it starts to partition the destination drive.

Is this the right place to report?

Masin

[barryascott]

@masin-wmde

Is this the right place to report?

You may get advice here, but not necessarily from a maintainer of anaconda.

You can report bugs to Fedora using How to file a bug :: Fedora Docs

[vekruse (Villy Kruse)]

@masin-wmde

On investigation I found that Anaconda immediately deletes the VTOYEFI partition when it starts to partition the destination drive.

Was that the old or the new Anaconda version?

[ernie-07 (Ernest Boyd)]

This is a feature not a bug. This will NEVER occur when custom partitioning is selected.

[masin-wmde (Masin Wiedner)]

Are there different installation images available? I download it about a week ago. I just fired up the installation image, and it says “Anaconda 42.27.12” on the About page. What’s the new, what’s the old Anaconda version?

[masin-wmde (Masin Wiedner)]

I can’t tell if you’re serious.

[masin-wmde (Masin Wiedner)]

I guess, the new Anaconda is the web-based version while the old one is … whatever it was before. So, yes, the Fedora Workstation installer I used differs massively from the ones in 38, 39, 40 and 41 I encountered before. That should be the new one, then.

[pg-tips (P G)]

@masin-wmde

What’s the new, what’s the old Anaconda version?

“New” is the rework with the browser-based UI. I believe this is used only on the Workstation (i.e. GNOME) Live USB-based installer. All the other desktop environments (and the netinstall) still use the old version for now.

[masin-wmde (Masin Wiedner)]

I found that Anaconda refers to forum.fedoraforum.org for support stuff. There I found this post

Using Ventoy to install from live media

referring to this comment on Distrowatch Weekly issue 1118

DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

I am neither the first nor the only one. But before I investigate more I need to find out where to report this bug.

Edit:

Similar posts:

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[pg-tips (P G)]

I think it’s already tracked here: 2362530 – Installer wipes other partitions on the live usb drive (ventoy)

Took a quick look, and this commit (“home reuse: remove bootloader partitions implicitly”) might be problematic. It looks for EFI partitions, and tries to be safe by refusing to delete if it finds more than one of them. However, if you’re installing onto a blank device with no existing EFI partition, does it then grab the installer USB’s EFI partition and erase that?

[vekruse (Villy Kruse)]

@masin-wmde

So, yes, the Fedora Workstation installer I used differs massively from the ones in 38, 39, 40 and 41 I encountered before. That should be the new one, then.

And the Workstation edition is the only one using the new Anaconda. KDE and the spin version uses the old Anaconda, at least before the upcoming Fedora 43.