Consistent Install Disk Selection in RHEL Kickstart

Question

In my kickstart installation I specify that the operating system should be installed on /dev/sda.

We have some Dell machines in our environment with iDRAC. When virtual media is attached in iDRAC, it maps Virtual CD drives and Virtual Floppy drives as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb leaving my desired installation drive as /dev/sdc. This causes my kickstart installation to fail due to it not being able to find the drive (/dev/sda) I had specified earlier.

Is there any way to specify in kickstart (anaconda) to install on the first "non-removable media", or to keep trying until it finds such device?

Bonus Points: If anyone has a more ideal method of specifying a drive installation destination.

Solution

I've never had this issue... but then again, I don't specify the block device in my kickstarts (which I run with Dell DRAC and HP ILO management).

Have you tried not specifying /dev/sda? I'm assuming you have a RAID controller, so the resulting VD will be the likely install target, no?

If there are other VD's that you wish to ignore, use the --ignoredisk kickstart option. You can also specify /dev/disk-by-id as targets, but that's more complicated.

# The following is the partition information you requested
# Note that any partitions you deleted are not expressed
# here so unless you clear all partitions first, this is
# not guaranteed to work
clearpart --all --initlabel
part /boot --fstype ext4 --size=500
part /usr --fstype ext4 --size=16384 --asprimary
part / --fstype ext4 --size=20480 --asprimary
part /var --fstype ext4 --size=8192
part swap --size=16384
part /tmp --fstype ext4 --size=6144

---

Edit: From the Red Hat kickstart guide:

Comments

[cheesesticksricepuck]

How would you go about filtering in /dev/disk/by-id ? I think not specifying will work for my scenario. Just curious as to what the filtering criteria would be or how you would perform it reliably.

[ewwhite]

@rainereality See my edit above.

[ewwhite]

@mr.zog There are multiple ways to specify a disk. Look in /dev/disk/by-id or /dev/disk/by-path.