Problem with fdisk partition aligment (for VMWare) and kickstart patitioning

[Hugh Brown]

Thomas Hemmingby Espe wrote:
> (this has also been posted to rhn-satellite-users, sorry for the cross-posting).
> 
> Hello.
> 
> We are trying to setup automated partition aligment during kickstart
> install. The kickstart is generated
> from a Satellite 5.4 installation.
> 
> In the %pre-section of the kickstart, I have the following script:
> 
> fdisk /dev/sda <<EOF
> d
> 1
> d
> 2
> d
> 3
> d
> 4
> n
> p
> 1
> 1
> +200m
> t
> fb
> x
> b
> 1
> 128
> w
> EOF
> 
> which deletes previously created partitions, creates a 200MB partition
> and aligns it to sector 128, as per
> http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_partition_align.pdf
> Then, we create the remaning partitions:
> 
> part /boot --fstype=ext3 --noformat --onpart=sda1
> part pv.00 --size=1000 --grow
> volgroup vg00 pv.00
> logvol /opt --vgname=vg00 --name=optvol --size=6000 --grow
> logvol /var/opt --vgname=vg00 --name=varoptvol --size=1000 --grow
> logvol /var --vgname=vg00 --name=varvol --size=4000
> logvol / --vgname=vg00 --name=rootvol --size=8000
> logvol swap --vgname=vg00 --name=swap --size=4000
> 
> During installation, after the %pre-scripts have run, the following
> messages appears:
> 
> "Unable to locate partition sda1 to use for /boot.
> Press OK to reboot your system"
> 
> On VT 2, I am able to verify that the partition does indeed exist
> (using fdisk -lu) and that it starts at sector 128.
> 
> Has anyone else been experiencing this? Does anyone see a solution to this?
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> 
> 

Instead of doing the "d 1 d 2 ..." I just zero out the mbr with dd

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

Then, I do a similar fdisk <<EOF, however, I also set sda1 to be 
bootable, and create a partition for the physical volume, set it to 
making sure to start/end on a boundary.

I'd double check to make sure you don't have a clearpart directive that 
is overwriting your changes.

You could also try running partprobe after you finish writing out the 
change to the partition table.

Hugh