RHEL 7.5 customized kickstart installation sometime stops on "Installation Destination" - No disks selected

[Pushpendra Chavan]

> Rebooting the system and trying again - this works and install goes
through. Any suggestions on how to debug this further - and what are the
possible points to check

This makes me think that there is no issues with your kickstart file, there
can be a problem for first instance disk detection and wipeout of RAID
signatures which doesn't let you

deploy first time.  In such situations, it's always great to capture
anaconda logs which you can get in /tmp of tty2 else, you can append the
anaconda boot parameters as follows

linux inst.ks=<your kickstart file path> inst.sshd=1 sshpw=testpassword
ip=192.168.0.100 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.168.0.1
nameserver=192.168.0.1

This enables your system's sshd during installation and when you get any
problem, just ssh to this system using Windows Putty or from other Linux
system with root and password as "testpassword" without quotes, you will
get anaconda shell. On this shell, you can go to /tmp and here are our
logs. These logs can be read, program.log will show you which command was
executed last and what's it's return value.

The disk names can be found in /proc/partitions or using parted command. So
you can troubleshoot from here.

Back to the problem, anaconda might not be able to wipeout the preinstalled
raid signatures from your disks, so you might want to force clean it by
adding a %pre script as follows.

%pre

wipefs -a -f /dev/sda

wipefs -a -f /dev/sdb

%end

Considering your disks names are /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. Please note that
above two commands in %pre section will fully wipe out your filesystems on
/dev/sda and /dev/sdb, if you are not sure about the disk naming which can
get changed across reboots, you can consider replacing those names with
/dev/disk/by-id values too, which will hard-code the kickstart, to make it
dynamic, you will need to inject little scripting into it.

Additionally, how does your kickstart  partitioning stanza looks like? Does
the clearpart statement have --all --drive=sda,sdb with it?

On Wed, Feb 6, 2019 at 9:35 AM Rashmi Jain <rashmjain at gmail.com> wrote:

> Setup : appliance with 2 VDrives in RAID 10 and RAID 1
> RHEL 7.5 based install with customized paritioning, text based install.
> Most of the time  the  customized works fine  but sometimes it stops on
> Generatign customized storage configuration. Installation Destination (No
> disks selected)
>
> Rebooting the system and trying again - this works and install goes
> through. Any suggestions on how to debug this further - and what are the
> possible points to check
>
>
> =============================================================================
>
> Installation
>
> 1) [x] Language settings 2) [x] Time settings
> (English (United States)) (America/Los_Angeles timezone)
> 3) [x] Installation source 4) [x] Software selection
> (Local media) (Custom software selected)
> 5) [!] Installation Destination 6) [x] Kdump
> (No disks selected) (Kdump is disabled)
> 7) [ ] Network configuration 8) [ ] User creation
> _______________________________________________
> Kickstart-list mailing list
> Kickstart-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/kickstart-list



-- 
Thanks,
Pushpendra M Chavan.
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