CentOS Kickstart Scripts w/ External CD Drive 1

[Kirsle]

I'm running into a problem trying to install CentOS on some servers using a kickstart script, for servers that don't have internal CD drives (and therefore need external USB CD drives for installation).

At the initial boot screen I select the kickstart script and then it boots to the blue screen before the anaconda graphical installer... while on the blue screen it pops up a dialog saying that it couldn't find any CD devices, and gives you the option to manually select a driver for it or to use a driver disc. If I select a driver (I pick the Linux usb-storage driver), it then continues to boot from the CD and go into the graphical installation.

The only problem is, when it gets to the graphical boot, it seems to forget about the kickstart script and instead does a normal installation with the step-by-step wizard (the kickstart script should cause the graphical installer to just go ahead and partition the drive and install the selected software without any user intervention at all).

I did some googling on this and found that I can load additional modules in the kickstart script, so I added this line to the very top of the file:

[b]device usb usb-storage[/b]
cdrom
install

However, it doesn't seem to load the module early enough in the boot process. When it gets to the blue screen text-mode stage, it loads an "ata-" module, then prompts for language selection and then prompts for the CD driver because it can't find any CD drives. Looking at the log on the other terminals (Ctrl-Alt-F2 or F3), it looks like it wasn't even able to find the kickstart file to begin with, saying "No CD devices found."

How can I get it to load the usb-storage driver before it tries looking for the kickstart file? I've poked around inside stage2.img and initrd.img and can't find any config file or anything that lists which modules to load.

Cuvou.com | My personal homepage

perl -e '$|=$i=1;print" oo\n<|>\n_|_";x:sleep$|;print"\b",$i++%2?"/":"_";goto x;'

 

[Kirsle]

I found this Red Hat bug ticket:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=483544

It seems that all versions of RHEL from 4 to 5.2 (at least) have this issue. The USB CD drives don't trigger the kernel to load the usb-storage driver right away. So if a flash drive is plugged in while the CD is booting, the flash drive causes usb-storage to load, which then helps it detect the CD drive too so it installs fine after that with the kickstart script.

Cuvou.com | My personal homepage

perl -e '$|=$i=1;print" oo\n<|>\n_|_";x:sleep$|;print"\b",$i++%2?"/":"_";goto x;'