SteamOS ISO USB installer wipes all partitions on first drive without prompt

vga-256 commented 5 years ago

Your system information

Steam client version: n/a
SteamOS version: DVD iso installer dated 2018-01-22 14:42

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

What 'should' happen:

A USB installer should prompt the user to either automatically install the OS, or install prompt-by-prompt in 'expert' mode.
A USB installer should prompt the user before making DESTRUCTIVE ALTERATIONS to their hard drive, regardless of whether the user has selected automatic or expert install mode.

What happened instead:

Wrote SteamOSDVD.iso to a usb stick, and booted it on my 2011 iMac.
Installer sat for 45 seconds at black screen, no prompt.
Suddenly installer begins loading SteamOS installer. Great! Great? Great.........
SteamOS installer begins scanning my hardware and loading itself into memory? I definitely did not press any buttons to indicate I was ready to install....
SteamOS installer begins scanning my drives to determine which disks it should... oh my god...
SteamOS installer begins re-partitioning my drives, and trying to rewrite the system EFI.
SteamOS installer fails to write the EFI. This is where I finally get control of my machine again, and survey the damage.
One year of development code on my OS X, Windows 7, and Ubuntu drives are gone thanks to the installer rewriting my primary disk's partition table without asking permission to.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

Hardware:

2011 Apple iMac 3.1 GHz i5, 12GB ram, ATI Radeon 6970m, 1.25 TB SSD+HD fusion drive
32gb USB stick

Software:

DVD iso installer dated 2018-01-22 14:42
Startup Disk Creator on Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop to write the ISO to a USB stick

Write ISO to usb stick using Startup Disk Creator
Boot iMac while holding left-Shift key to get boot prompt. Select USB stick.
Wait for 30 seconds - 1 minute at black screen. Not sure if this is grub trying to find a system to boot?
SteamOS installer automatically begins installing and wipes /dev/sda, writing its own partitions wherever it wishes.

Obviously I am unbelievably and correctly angry about an installer capable of such destructive data writes without a single prompt. I do not even know what to suggest here, as I've never seen an installer in 35 years that did not prompt at least once to make sure the user really wanted to wipe a drive.

TTimo commented 5 years ago

Hello @256colour, we're sorry this happened to you.

This is the first screen that comes up when booting from the installer: https://www.dropbox.com/s/thod69cib8360ss/SteamOS%202%20.148%20installer.jpg?dl=0

Is it possible this screen didn't display on your hardware? The prompt is not on a timeout, it will not go into the Automated Install without a key press, but if the display failed to initialize I can see how that would be a problem.

vga-256 commented 5 years ago

@TTimo That screen definitely did not appear when booting natively on my hardware. The screen does appear when booting the ISO from a virtualized VMware install however.

It's very possible the initial (grub?) screen didn't display on my hardware, but I can definitely tell you that I did not touch the keyboard once before the installation began. After I saw that the installation began, I even powered down the computer to restart it in case I had hit a key by accident. The exact same behaviour the second time as well. Unfortunately, the second boot made it far enough to wipe the drive.

krisman commented 5 years ago

@256colour Are you using rEFInd, by any chance? We observed a bug in it, that made it select the first boot option, Automatic Install.

vga-256 commented 5 years ago

@krisman I don't believe so. I believe I was running from vanilla OS X with Boot camp installed, using a fusion drive.

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