Confirming predefined partition layout using kickstart

[Jason Kohles]

On Dec 6, 2007, at 3:02 PM, Peter Åstrand wrote:

> On Mon, 26 Nov 2007, Peter Åstrand wrote:
>
>> ...
>> "Could not allocate requested partitions". If we are using:
>>
>> zerombr
>> clearpart --all --initlabel
>> partition / --fstype ext3 --size=1600 --asprimary
>> partition swap --recommended
>>
>> ...things works great, but then there's no confirmation.
>
> I've discovered one major problem: When booting from a USB stick with
> diskboot.img, a kickstart file like this erases the USB stick! How can
> this be prevented? It seems like it's fairly reliable that the first  
> disk
> is normally sda, but if booting from USB stick, sda is the stick. I  
> guess
> we need to use "ignoredisk" on the USB stick or something like that,  
> but I
> cannot find any obvious solution.
>
If you know it will always be sda, you can do:

ignoredisk --drives=sda

If you don't know for sure that it will always be sda, you can build  
an ignoredisk line from %pre.  This is the code I use to ignore the  
usb stick regardless of where it shows up...

# This part goes in the main body of ks.cfg, I use it for several
# different configuration things built by my %pre scripts
%include /tmp/generated-configuration

%pre
# This %pre just makes sure the file exists, so the include
# never fails
touch /tmp/generated-configuration

%pre --interpreter=python
# This is a generic %pre script that creates a file named
# /tmp/disks with the device name and the size of the disk in MB
# You can use this for all kinds of stuff
import os
import sys
import parted
sys.path.append('/usr/lib/anaconda')
import isys

drives = isys.hardDriveDict().keys()
drives.sort()

f = open( "/tmp/disks", "w" )

for drive in drives:
     device = "/tmp/" + drive
     if not os.access(device, os.O_RDONLY):
         try:
             isys.makeDevInode(drive, device)
         except:
             continue
     dev = parted.PedDevice.get(device)
     mb = (float(dev.heads * dev.cylinders * dev.sectors) / (1024 *  
1024) * dev.sector_size)
     dev.close()

     f.write( "%s %s\n" % ( drive, mb ) )

%pre
# This one looks for disks smaller than a given size, and if any are  
found, ignores them
TINY=`awk 'BEGIN { ORS="," } $2 < 2000 { print $1 }' /tmp/disks | sed  
's/,$//'`
if [ -n "$TINY" ]; then
     echo "ignoredisk --drives=$TINY" >> /tmp/generated-configuration
fi

-- 
Jason Kohles, RHCA RHCDS RHCE
email at jasonkohles.com - http://www.jasonkohles.com/
"A witty saying proves nothing."  -- Voltaire