[CentOS] Kickstart install surprise

Bill Campbell

centos at celestial.com
Wed Sep 12 19:50:17 UTC 2007


I have to say that I was more that a bit surprised, if not to say dismayed
when I booted a system with CentOS 5 installed to test a kickstart CD in
interactive mode, took it to the custom partitioning screen, then rebooted
without saving anything only to come up with a grub prompt, and the disk's
partition table wiped.  The ks.cfg file did say to wipe the disk when
installing, but I would expect that it wouldn't do this in interactive mode
until one told it to start the installation.

I have been installing Linux systems for well over a decade, starting with
Caldera Network Desktop 1.0, all versions of Caldera through 2001, and SuSE
from 8.1 through SLES10, and never have I seen an installation procedure
that would write to anything on the hard drive without asking first.

This certainly violates the Principle of Least Surprise.

Bill
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