Kickstart from an external drive

[Hardik Modi]

Hello All,

I'm putting together a disk that'll be used to upgrade systems to CentOS
5.3. Some of these systems have accessible internal DVD drives and others
don't. My kickstart file is quite simple and I bury it inside the initrd so
that I don't have to specify a device on the boot line. This has worked for
me with CentOS 4.4 disks in the past. The goal for the install/upgrade is
for it to be done largely unattended. The install method is cdrom.

This setup works quite well when booting from the internal drive. But on
systems where I can't use that drive and I use an external USB connected DVD
drive instead, I end up at this prompt that says "The CentOS CD was not
found in any of your CDROM drives. Please insert the CentOS CD and press OK
to retry". Of course, the disk is present and it's the one the system has
booted off of and where it's found the initrd and kickstart. It also has a
correct discinfo file.

Quite interestingly, if I select the back option a few times, it appears to
select the correct drive and boot. Here's what I see on Alt-F3.

Many repetitions of:
11:04:10 INFO    : starting to STEP_URL
11:04:10 INFO    : trying to mount CD device hda
11:04:10 INFO    : ejecting /tmp/cdrom...
11:04:11 DEBUG   : going to set language to en_US.UTF-8
11:04:11 INFO    : setting language to en_US.UTF-8
11:04:11 INFO    : starting to STEP_URL
11:04:11 INFO    : trying to mount CD device hda

And then it succeeds:
11:04:11 INFO    : trying to mount CD device scd0

Questions:
- can I force it to look at scd0 for the CentOS distribution?
- even better, can I have it try both, so that I can maintain a single
kickstart and isolinux entry?

Many thanks,
Hardik.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/kickstart-list/attachments/20091002/18c2fccd/attachment.htm>