CD not found when installing from external drive

[Hardik Modi]

Hello All,

I create custom disks to do installs on a set of machines. Some of these
machines have bezels that cover the internal disk drive tray, so my
assumption is that we're always doing installs from external drives with USB
connectors. My kickstart files are buried in the initrd.img, so that I can
use file:/ks.cfg as the location on the boot command.

Now, this generally works, but every now and then I see a machine where the
user ends up with a message titled 'CD Not Found'  with further text about
the CentOS CD not being found in any of the CDROM drives and asking the user
to insert the disk and press OK. At the bottom, there's an OK and Back pair
of buttons. Prior to this, I can see the usb-storage driver being loaded,
plus cdrom.ko and a few others.

We used to revert to using the internal drive in these cases, but then one
of my colleagues got a little frustrated and repeatedly hit the OK and Back
buttons a few times and somehow the install got going again. We've now found
that this works on pretty much every system that presents us with this
message. I don't have a precise sequence to follow, but selecting those two
buttons upwards of 10 times seems to do the trick. Alt-F3 reveals that the
usual set of drivers got loaded again. I can see many messages about
cdrom.ko getting unloaded and loaded again.

Any pointers about how to avoid this situation? It's not a dealbreaker, but
if there was a way to clean this up, I'd certainly want to.

We're using stock CentOS 5.3 images with a custom kickstart file right now.
We've seen this with CentOS 4.4 in the past (not certain the workaround
applied). The machines are various SuperMicro brand servers.

Thanks,
Hardik.
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