Hi folks.
I maintain a bunch of centos based machines that are built using a somewhat stripped down (limited number but mainly stock rpms) centos distro. The installation process is plain anaconda stuff with a kickstart file on the root of the DVD/iso. The current hardware and media i'm using is DVD based.
On machines that have internal DVD drives (all IDE CD/DVD drives), everything is fine. However, I'm having a problem that started in 4.6 and continues in 4.7 on machines that don't have an internal DVD drive and therefore i must use a USB DVD drive. On these machines, everything goes ok in the beginning. The DVD is "seen" by the machine and boots fine, the isolinux screen comes up and i let the timeout go or i hit return to continue. Then, almost immediately thereafter, (when i should see the blue screen with text about loading drivers) i see the blue screen with the prompt for language. This is supposed to be a kickstart install, so at this point i know i'm hosed.
If I use alt-f3 or alt-f4 (can't remember which one), i can see an error message saying that the usb-storage driver is loaded, but it cannot find any USB storage devices to read from.
If i alt-f1 back to the main blue screen with the language prompt, i can go through the prompts for language, keyboard, however when i get to "install type", and select "usb cdrom" (i can't remember the text exactly...the machines are in the server room, and i'm at my desk ATM), it fails again. I can alt-f3 back to see that the same error about loading the usb-storage driver was successful but it can't find any attached usb storage device. Unfortunately, at this point, there's no shell yet available in alt-f2, so i can't poke around much).
It seems like somehow, something is happening like the USB bus is being reset and it's "loosing" the usb devices and they can't be found anymore.
Note that the original boot occurred of the DVD drive (i got past the isolinux screen), so it's at least working in the beginning to get that far.
I had seen this problem occur a handful of times in the past in my same distro based on CentOS-4.5, however it was sporadic and was usually solved by changing the manufacturer of DVD drive (i thought it was a hardware vendor not implementing the USB spec properly since most devices worked...only a handful didn't). However, since moving to 4.6 and also in 4.7, this problem is completely repeatable with all USB DVD drives i have (granted it's only 3 different vendors/models, but they all don't work, whereas all 3 of these used to work in the 4.5 based distro).
Also, as i stated earlier, on machines with internal DVD drives (IDE based), everything works fine.
Has anyone seen anything like this? Do you have any suggestions to try?
One thing i'm going to try is downloading the stock 4.7 DVD ISO and see if it fails. The download is taking a while, so i won't be able to report back on that test until tomorrow.
Oh yeah, the machines i'm using that are having this problem are a Dell R200, Supermicro PDSMi, and Supermicro P4SC8. I don't have the DVD drive mfg and model numbers handy, i'll get those as well.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
...alex...