Re: Kickstart partition question

[Carl Riches <riches ms washington edu>]

On Thu, 2003-01-23 at 12:07, paulmc rogers com wrote:
> Is it possible to specify which partition a mount point should be allocated to?
> 
> I have a number of machines that I need to re-kickstart, and they need to have a partition on them to allow them to "rekickstart" themselves (via a hard drive kickstart).  After doing some tests, i found a couple of machines (identical hardware) that put this partition in different places (some put it on /dev/hda5 and others on /dev/hda6).  I used the exact same kickstart floppy to set up the partitions.
> 
> Once the partitions are created, I can then specify the partition, but if there are no pre-existing partitions (or the partition table isn't what I want), I can't specify the --onpart command.
> 
> Just thinking out loud, would I be able to use "parted" before I kickstarted to partition it the way I wanted it and then kickstart it using the --onpart command...
> 
>

We do this, and you can do it too.  Our method only works if the target
systems have the same size disk drive (actually, we have two kickstart
configurations because we have two disk drive sizes in our environment).

When defining what filesystems go on which partition, we use this:


 # P A R T I T I O N   S P E C I F I C A T I O N
zerombr yes
part /     --onpart sda1
part /tmp  --onpart sda5
part /usr  --onpart sda6
part /home --onpart sda7
part /var  --onpart sda8
part /opt  --onpart sda9
part swap  --onpart sda10


We then have a "%pre" section to partition the disk.  Here is that
section for a 9GB SCSI disk:


# P R E - I N S T A L L A T I O N   C O M M A N D S
%pre

# create the disk device
mknod /dev/sda

# partition the disk
echo | fdisk /dev/sda <<EOF
o
w
EOF

echo | fdisk /dev/sda <<EOF
n
p
1
1
33
n
e
2
34
2213
n
l
34
66
n
l
67
589
n
l
590
851
n
l
852
917
n
l
918
983
n
l
984
1114
n
l
1115
2213
t
10
82
w
EOF


We had to manually partition a disk using "fdisk" to get the values
above.  You will need to do the same thing for your disk(s).
-- 
Carl G. Riches
Software Engineer
Department of Mathematics
Box 354350			voice:     206-543-5082 or 206-616-3636
University of Washington	fax:       206-543-0397
Seattle, WA  98195-4350		internet:  riches ms washington edu