Use entire disk as PV.

[Speagle, Andy]

> Speagle, Andy wrote: > Sent: 10 May 2011 13:53
> > > Did you use a double dash for “--preexisting”?  I didn’t notice as I
> > was typing it that Outlook had
> > > “helpfully” changed the two dashes to a single emdash.  Did the
> > pvcreate command actually work: does that
> > > disk now have a full-disk PV on it?  In the pvcreate documentation,
> > > I
> > just came across
> >
> > Aye, I had used the --useexisting option with the double-hyphen.
> >
> > > Here’s something else to try:
> > >
> > > echo "part pv.01 --onpart sdb --grow" >> /tmp/custom-part echo
> > > "volgroup rootvg /dev/sdb pv.01" >> /tmp/custom-part
> > >
> > > If kickstart refuses to create a partition on sdb, you will have to
> > do something like
> > >
> > > lvm pvcreate /dev/sdb
> > > lvm vgcreate rootvg /dev/sdb
> > > echo "logvol / --fstype ext3 --name=root --vgname=rootvg --size=4096
> > --useexisting" >> /tmp/custom-part
> >
> > This seems to have worked for the RHEL 6 installer.  RHEL 5.5 still
> > barfs on this saying that no VG exists with the name "rootvg" ...
> >
> > I have filed a BZ with this as a feature request.  I hope this gets
> > added at some point.  It should be fairly trivial to do.
> 
> Is it any better in RHEL 5.6?
> Were you able to tell if the lvm commands in the %pre script actually
> worked?  Try them manually from a kickstart shell; that may give a clue
> where things are going wrong.  If the volgroup is being created, maybe
> kickstart in RHEL 5.5 isn't re-reading the disk information.  Maybe
> there's some way to get it to do that, or at worst get your %pre script to
> detect whether the disk has volgroup information.  If not, create it and
> reboot; else write /tmp/custom-part to create the logical volumes and
> continue the install.

RHEL 5.6 suffers the same fate.  I received a response on my BZ for this feature request that native support for PVs on entire disk will be included for anaconda somewhere in RHEL 6 ... but that it will not be back-ported to any RHEL 5 anaconda.  

All of the LVM commands are working just duckily.  Anaconda just refuses to handle this situation.  The error is quite explicit that it's an issue parsing the kickstart file.  Anaconda is expecting a "volgroup" definition and won't continue without one.

-Andy