Comment 8 for bug 1044111

Is there no better solution than to say "Change your BIOS settings"? There is nothing to put the idea in the user's mind that that may be the problem, especially these days when many users have never seen a floppy disk in their lives.

blkid will make gparted lock up for 20 minutes or more, other commands fail much more quickly. Because gparted calls blkid, one never sees any output from blkid when it is causing gparted to seem to hang. This means people installing Linux for the first time think the installer does not work and they are likely to go away and not come back saying "Linux won't work on this PC". A PC that likely has a functioning Windows on it.

At the very least there needs to be some sort of clue to the user, for example, programs that rely on blkid checking to see if it takes ages to respond and then informing the user the BIOS might need changing to match the actual drives installed, and the "System Requirements" documents for the various distributions changed to say "make sure your BIOS matches your installed drives because there is one time where it will cause your PC to hang which is when you install Linux".

As it stands, this problem is an example of "Linux is too hard to use".

It actually took me over 20 hours of determined struggling to finally work out why I could not seem to install Linux on my laptop, despite trying many distros, and to work out it was this blkid / gparted problem.