Drivers, initrd and kickstart

[Hardik Modi]

I use kickstart to do mostly-unattended imaging on systems that aren't
network-connected. This generally works great, but I'm a little puzzled
about some driver issues I'm facing right now.

The base disk is CentOS 5.3 and the systems are generally SuperMicro and IBM
xSeries servers. I've just had to add a new megaraid_sas driver to work with
a new LSI controller. To do this, I took apart the driver update disk
provided by IBM and in the stock initrd, I replaced the .ko and merged in
the pci.ids and modules* files. The net effect of all this is that the
controller is recognized on the IBM system and boots just fine. I do an rpm
install with the new driver during the post section and the system operates
correctly there after.

The catch is that I can't boot up a SuperMicro system with the 3ware RAID
controller with this disk. I don't see the 3w-9xxx and ata-piix drivers
getting loaded and then it gets stuck at the 'CentOS disk not found' screen.
Absent my changes, the system boots just fine.

I've spent time looking through the files I've modified and am certain that
only the LSI information has been added and it's not in conflict with the
3ware entries, in terms of IDs and dependencies. modules.cgz and initrd.img
are both generated files, so I don't see a space issue, the way one might
have in RHEL/CentOS 4, where you had to dd a fixed block count to generate
the initrd.

I know the kickstart is getting loaded, so I guess I could force the driver
to be loaded. I've just realised that I could use the driverdisk option in
my kickstart file, but I don't have network and I can't see a way to force
it to pick up the file from the boot disk. I don't want to use separate
media here, so dd from isolinux isn't really an option.

Any thoughts on a better approach or ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

Regards,
Hardik.
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