Handling complete failure in the installer

[Colin Watson]

(I agree with most of this.)

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 09:33:16PM +0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Evan Dandrea wrote on 12/11/09 14:18:
> > - <b>Check CD for defects, try a new CD or a different installation medium.</b>
> >    <s>The installation medium could be faulty.  It is reccomended that you run
> >    the "Check CD for defects" option you saw when booting this CD/DVD.
> >    This may rule out the possibility of a bad CD burn.
> 
> With a button to click to do that, if possible.

Quite often, what's happened here is that the kernel encountered a read
error, and then squashfs decided to fall over in a messy heap. The
result is usually a downward spiral in quite short order; there's
generally enough in cache to be able to display an error message, I
think, but in many cases we aren't going to be able to launch an
application.

The most practical option here is probably a button to cause an
immediate reboot (after which we've told them what to select). The
shutdown procedure before reboot might not work either, but at least the
user has been clued into a possible cause and will probably eventually
hit the power button, which isn't so dreadful if they were due to reboot
anyway.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]