Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:
Is there a way in a kickstart install to affect the order in which modules get loaded? I want to load 3w-xxxx before 3w-9xxx so that my OS mirror drives take their proper place as sda and sdb, but centos-4 wants to load 3x-9xxx first, making my (unbootable) big arrays the first two drives. In this configuration, it seems that even trying to install grub to /dev/sdc fails. Ideas? Thanks.
The order of devices should be irrelevant. It is more or less cosmetic issue. It is more than possible that order will be different during installation, and once machine is booted up from the disk. Once the machine is booted from the disk, it will most likely be the order they appear in /etc/modprobe.conf. On my Adaptec I2O RAID controler, the order disks are detected and assigned names is totally random. Changes on every boot. Interestingly, Adaptec BIOS detects disks always in same order, so does PC BIOS when it takes over once Adaptec BIOS initialization is done. It's only i2o_block device driver under Linux that has this random behaviour.
The grub installation from Anaconda has some issues on RHEL4/CentOS4/FC3. Check archives for this list and Fedora mailing list. Basically, if Anaconda fails to install it, boot into rescue mode after the system installation is complete and install Grub by hand (chroot, grub-install). Alternatvie is to use LILO if you are more familiar with it then with Grub. LILO can be selected as option if you are doing kickstart installation. Not sure if you can select it from GUI? Anyhow, you can always install it from rescue mode.
Once you install the system, you could (probably) attempt to use udev configuration files to assign specific device names to specific devices. Check /usr/share/doc/udev-039/writing_udev_rules/index.html file (part of udev package) on info how to do it (OK, you'll have to have some running CentOS4 or Fedora system, first).
There are also some tricks to avoid using device names in /etc/fstab. The best one is to use LVM. Then it is irrelevant how the kernel calls your devices. You are always accessing them using fixed LVM names. Using LVM is good idea anyhow, IMO.
LVM doesn't work for boot partition (which is usually either / or /boot, depending on if you created separate partition for /boot or not). However, for that one you can always use file system label to reference it from /etc/fstab and lilo.conf (maybe also grub.conf?). Another neat trick for boot partition is placing it on software RAID. Software RAID device names (/dev/md*) are also more or less fixed.