[CentOS] kickstart from harddisk to harddisk?

Dogsbody

dan at dogsbody.org
Sat Mar 24 00:27:07 UTC 2007


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



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