[CentOS] Re: kickstart from harddisk to harddisk?

[Scott Silva]

Dogsbody spake the following on 3/23/2007 5:27 PM:
> 
> Please help with a problem that is slowly driving me nuts :-/
> 
> *Quick problem*
> Can I kickstart an install by reading all the files from a single
> partition on the system and installing onto all the spare space on the
> same drive?
> 
> I am using `harddrive --partition=sda1 --dir=/` but it doesn't seem to
> work!!
> 
> *Longer version*
> I have a server that has no CD-ROM and that I would like to install a
> custom version of CentOS onto.  This is supplied as an ISO image.  The
> server is in a datacentre so I can't setup other machines to boot off
> however a single boot server is available for diagnostics only.
> 
> So far I have
> - Netbooted the machine
> - Wiped all partitions and created a single 800MB partition
> - Made this ext2 (kickstart seems to need ext2)
> - Mounted this drive and downloaded the ISO to it
> - Mounted the ISO as loopback
> - Copied all the data from the ISO into the disk
> - Setup extlinux and used the isolinux config
> - Modified the kickstart file...
> Changed `cdrom` to `harddrive --partition=sda1 --dir=/`
> Removed the line `clearpart --all`
> - Reboot
> 
> Now, the system boots from disk, vmlinuz and initrd.img both unpack and
> execute fine!  (so the syslinux/extlinux seems to be working great) and
> pages of system startup scroll past.  It seems to then start asking for
> questions that should be covered by the kickstart file including asking
> where all the files are on the disk and then showing me the disk with
> all the files on! :-/
> 
> "What partition and directory on that partition hold the CD (iso9660)
> images"
> 
> After all of this I feel so close yet so far!
> 
> Thank you very much in advance
> 
> Dan
The last time I did a hd to hd install was in RedHat 9, but I seem to remember
just having the ISO image on the hard drive, and anaconda loop mounted it and
ran.

I just looked it up in the install docs;
http://www.centos.org/docs/4/html/rhel-ig-x8664-multi-en-4/s1-steps-hd-install.html


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