Old style fixed partitions in KS-- Anaconda bug??

[John Summerfield]

Cris Rhea wrote:
> I'm trying to lay out disk partitions in a certain way-- 
> This has worked for years, but recently broke due either to
> a change in the way Kickstart works or a bug in Anaconda.
> 
> I use sfdisk to lay out the drive in the %pre section:
> 
> %pre
> 
> sfdisk -uM /dev/sda <<EOF
> ,150,L
> ,,E
> ;
> ;
> ,512,L
> ,2048,S
> ,6000,L
> ,2048,L
> ,10000,L
> ,,L
> EOF
> 
> (this works correctly)
> 
> If I specify what goes where in the KS file:
> 
> part /boot --fstype ext3 --onpart sda1
> part /tmp --fstype ext3 --onpart sda9
> part /var --fstype ext3 --onpart sda8
> part swap --onpart sda6
> part /local1 --fstype ext3 --onpart sda10
> part /usr --fstype ext3 --onpart sda7
> part / --fstype ext3 --onpart sda5
> 
> Anaconda croaks with the following error:
> 
> 15:27:41 CRITICAL: parted exception: Error: Error informing the kernel 
> about modifications to partition /dev/sda5 -- Device or resource busy.  
> This means Linux won't know about any changes you made to /dev/sda5 until 
> you reboot -- so you shouldn't mount it or use it in any way before rebooting.
> 
> 
> Googling this error shows it popping up at various time (back to FC3 or
> so), but no solutions.
> 
> This worked fine in CentOS 4.4 (RHEL4 u4), but broke in the next update
> (and is still broken in CentOS 5.1 [RHEL5 u1]).
> 
> I could work around this in CentOS 4 by loading systems against an old 
> 4.4 image, then applying all the updates to get to 4.6. I can't do this in
> 5, since it is broken for all releases...
> 
> Is there better way to achieve what I'm doing or is this just 
> an Anaconda bug that's making my life difficult? I don't see an advantage
> to moving everything to LVM for simple single-disk systems...


It's possible to drive fdisk in much the same way; if Michael's 
suggestion doesn't work then that might (different code may produce a 
different result).

So might not creating sda5 in {,s}fdisk, and doing it in Anaconda instead.



-- 

Cheers
John

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