Installing RHEl5.4 on 64 bit box with additional driverdisk(megasr)

[Rick Stevens]

On 03/23/2010 12:35 AM, Prasad Pednekar wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Pardon me for my knowledge about RHEL installation process using a
> kickstart file, as I me being a newbie to this.
>
> Currently we are creating a custom RHEL5.4 DVD, the issue lies when we
> try to load the megasr driverdisk which we have copied onto the DVD,
>
> We want to load the megasr driver in place of the default ahci drivers
> as to configure RAID on the box.
>
> But with various different options tried out we are blocked and cannot
> proceed further.
>
> Please let me know if you need any further information.

I assume you've tried adding a "device scsi megasr" option to your
kickstart file.  Failing that, you could create a driver disk and
either put its contents in the root of a partition or put the disk
image somewhere on your network and use the "driverdisk" option:

	driverdisk /dev/hda1 --type=ext3
	driverdisk --source=ftp://host/path/to/dd.img
	driverdisk --source=http://host/path/to/dd.img
	driverdisk --source=nfs:host:/path/to/dd.img

It is rather difficult to force-feed a driver into a kickstart system
beyond those methods. The only other way I can think of is to respin
the DVD image.  You need to create a directory on the disk you can
expand the images of the disk in and bugger the installer's kernel and
that of Anaconda by changing the modules.alias file to call in your
driver for the PCI ID of your card in place of the ahci driver, 
something like:

WAS:
	alias pci:v000011ABd00006121sv*sd*bc*sc*i* ahci

CHANGE TO:
	alias pci:v000011ABd00006121sv*sd*bc*sc*i* megasr

You also need to put the megasr driver in the appropriate bits of the
/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/ata directory, then respin the
DVD image completely.

Assuming you have something more recent than RHEL 5.4 (say Fedora 7 or
later), there are tools around to do this pretty easily (e.g. a tool
called "revisor").  Those would probably be your best bet and I'd
highly recommend it if you're going to be respinning images a lot.
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