floppy boot order, but this time on system=isapc

[mitchblank]

Describe the issue

Just was frustrated with a few UTM issues in a row... enough that I wanted to make somebody read about it.

What I wanted to do: play with ELKS on a very minimal i486 machine. To do the install I need to boot from a floppy a few times until the harddrive is ready to go.

FIrst thing I tried which didn't work: reordering the Drives section to put the floppy first. This apparently was a known issue four years ago (#2492) but for whatever reason the fix was only made to the q35 system (691497b). For some reason if you're using a different system profile this remains a foot-gun. Not sure why it was fixed in this limited way, hopefully there was a good reason.

Second thing I tried: all I really needed was to get the BIOS boot menu up instead of auto-booting from the harddrive (i.e. -boot menu=on). You'd think this would just be a checkbox in the QEMU pane, but apparently not. Again, there was a change made four years ago (#2504) to make this the default but not on the "isapc" profile.

Third thing I tried: just adding the flag myself in the Arguments. However, although I can add -boot menu=on at the end of the qemu command line, if I click Save and then enter Edit again the string is emptied out. To make it even more annoying I can add an invalid argument like-boot xxx -- it only silently nulls out the menu=on I want to set. I suppose this another piece of #5910.

Anyway, I just moved on to running qemu manually for this experiment, which is fine... but I hit UTM-specific frustrations I wanted to report.

Configuration

• UTM Version: 4.6.4
• macOS Version: 15.4.1
• Mac Chip: M1