[Spacewalk-list] kickstarting from a USB stick/drive without the installer formatting the USB drive

[Sabuj Pattanayek]

Hi,

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Troy Dawson <dawson at fnal.gov> wrote:
> Not quite sure what this has to do with spacewalk other than spacewalk will
> let you do kickstarts.  You didn't mention what OS you were trying to do the
> kickstart for.  There are different options for RHEL3,4,5,6 and the
> Fedora's.

Doing text mode installs for centos4/5 here w/spacewalk 1.0.

> But I finally gave up with fixing my kickstart and just figured out when to
> pull out the usb drive before the installer sucks it in as part of the
> system drives.
>
> I pull the usb drive out right when the screen turns blue to black before
> the graphics come up.  But that is on a RHEL5 (actually SL5) system.

Hrrm, IIRC I couldn't safely pull out a CD until the system started
being formatted, but I'll try pulling out the USB stick right after
the screen goes from black to blue (right after the kernel finishes
booting and anaconda starts up in text mode). In any case, I did get
it to work on a system with a primary SATA HDD with the following
additions to the kickstart:

ignoredisk --drives=sdb
bootloader --driveorder=sda,hda

Which tells parted to leave sdb alone and grub to use only sda or hda
(for PATA systems). For installing to PATA systems I guess I would
have to try the pulling out the USB stick trick just before anaconda
starts otherwise it would try to use the USB stick as disk since it
would probably come up as sda.

Thanks,
Sabuj Pattanayek