[CentOS] Installing on partitionable RAID arrays

Thu Mar 26 13:44:34 UTC 2009
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

Ross Walker wrote:

>> RedShift wrote:
>>>
>>> As a follow-up, I found the documentation I wrote how to install  
>>> CentOS
>>> without any installer:
>>
>> That looks useful.  Do you have any hints about how to get the right
>> drivers installed if you wanted to build a disk to be moved to a
>> different machine?
> 
> That's even easier.
> 
> Add the disk driver names in modprobe.conf the ones for system disks  
> in the top half, data disks below. Then run a mkinitrd.
> 
> Modprobe.conf excerpt:
> 
> alias scsi_adapter ata_piix
> alias scsi_adapter0 ahci
> alias scsi_adapter1 mega_sas
> alias scsi_adapter2 mpt
> 
> # mv /boot/init-$(uname -r).img /boot/init-$(uname -r).img
> # mkinitrd /boot/init-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
> 
> That should make an initrd with the drivers necessary to boot your  
> other boxes (of course using your own disk drivers and not mine).

Thanks - but there is another half to that question. How do you find the 
names of the drivers that match any particular hardware without running 
the installer?

I'd like to have a generic backup/restore mechanism that would drop in a 
   tar image (etc.) from one machine and come up running on something 
different - or a fixup procedure for disks that have been moved from one 
chassis to another.  Even where the machines are identical and I put the 
target machine's MAC addresses in the ifcfg-ethX file, something seems 
to rename them and screw things up when a disk is moved.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com