modifying fedora core kickstart w/newer kernel

[nate]

Fedora core 4 that is ...

I'm still working on convincing the folks at my company to go
with something newer but for now several systems are on FC4.

Anyways, what I'm trying to do is modify the kickstart installer
so that it uses the slightly more up-to-date 2.6.17-1.2142_FC4
kernel rather than the default of 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp
primarily because the latest tg3 drivers don't appear to
compile under the older kernel. Some of the hardware is fairly
new and the older tg3 driver doesn't work on it.

I got most of it figured out at this point, however I am stuck
on getting anaconda to mount the partitions, the behavior I see
is:

- system boots up
- loads network driver
- downloads kickstart config via http
- anaconda starts
  - wipes partition table
  - creates new partitions
  - formats partitions
  - mounts the 'proc' and 'sys' partitions
  - enables swap
  - starts installing RPMs

It does not attempt to mount the '/' partition, as a result
everything is installed to /mnt which is apparently on a ramdisk,
and the system very quickly runs out of memory and crashes.
(OOM killer goes nuts). Using the same kickstart config file
with the 'original' kernel image and the original initrd
the system installs fine. The only difference is:

- new kernel image (taken from the rpm itself, this isn't
  a self-built image)
- built a new modules.cgz from the modules in the updated
  kernel, and replaced the other modules-related files
  such as the pci.ids etc from RHEL 4 ES update 4
- eventually also replaced the same modules files in
  the stage 2 installer but that had no effect.

My test system is vmware running IDE disks, the IDE
driver is compiled directly into the kernel. I've been
using linux for about 10 years now and I just can't
see why from the minor changes I've done would cause
anaconda to not want to mount the filesystems.

Looking at the anaconda.log there are no errors, it clearly
shows it formatting the filesystems, but it makes no attempt to
mount them. I can mount the filesystems by hand from the
busybox terminal fairly easily..

I suppose worst case I could come up with some sort of parted
script and run everything by hand in %pre but I'd rather not,
if I can avoid it.

Is there documentation somewhere that describes how from
start to finish a kickstart config is generated from the kernel
itself, to the initrd, to the stage 2 image, etc etc etc.

I've been working on this for about 9 hours now and about all
the docs I can find are related to adding drivers to an existing
kickstart image (which I've done on tons of occasions). I've
yet to find docs on anything more in-depth than that.

thanks!

nate