So if I'm understanding correctly, you cannot reuse /home on a dual-boot with Windows legacy BIOS machine.

I guess I had never noticed because I always test by making a new Fedora install.

This is an interesting case. The Windows dual-boot criteria seems written with the clean install case in mind. The custom partitioning criteria explicitly references preserving /home however. So the argument could be made this has blocker potential.

As far as the current ask of a freeze exception goes, I feel like this can't be a very common case anymore, and fixing it probably requires poking at pretty fundamental parts of the install / partitioning process so I worry about unintended breakage.

FinalFE -1

Well, I'm really confused on how to vote on this one... this comments here and here make me think if we want to suport this kind of arrangement from a dying OS (win10)

FinalFE 0

Yeah a little confusing but as Brandon mentioned.

FinalFE -1

Proposed for a blocker discussion:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2353002#c21

FinalBlocker -1
CommonBugs +1

The situation is not in favor of reinstalling Fedora using WebUI when there is no biosboot partition. However this will only affect BIOS installations with Windows. This can be workarounded by using Anaconda GTK, it is also possible to remove the anaconda-webui package from the Live image before running Anaconda, so the system can still be reinstalled with Fedora 42 no matter which ISO one uses.
I believe that we should comment on this behaviour to let people know and we should perhaps revisit in the future, if Anaconda GTK goes away and there will be no way to perform this.

Windows doesn't really have anything much to do with this, AFAICS. The important condition is that you have an existing MBR-labelled disk which you don't want to completely blow away. There are ways to achieve this which don't involved WIndows; you might have started with an old Fedora, or a different Linux distro, or formatted the disk manually.

It's not that much trouble to repartition the whole disk to replace MBR with GPT if it only has to be done once, as is the case with a Fedora-only legacy BIOS machine. But dual boot with Windows makes the one-time fix impossible (by insisting on MBR with legacy BIOS).

Discussed during the 2025-03-24 blocker review meeting [1]:

• AGREED: 2353002 - AcceptedBlocker (Final) - this is accepted as a violation of "The installer must be able to create and install to any workable partition layout using any file system and/or container format combination offered in a default installer configuration". We note that resolving this does not require implementation of MBR support; this could be sufficiently addressed by not allowing the user to attempt unsupported operations on an MBR-labelled disk.

[1] https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/blocker-review_matrix_fedoraproject-org/2025-03-24/f42-blocker-review.2025-03-24-16.02.log.html

AGREED AcceptedFinalBlocker

The following votes have been closed:

• Accepted FinalBlocker (+0, 0, -1)
  • -1 by lruzicka

Release F42 is no longer tracked by BlockerBugs, closing this ticket.