If the disks cannot be identified deterministically, then I cannot avoid
making my kickstart installs 2-stepped.  Whether I pre-label the disks or
install the system with a single disk and add the second disk after the
install.

I appreciate the situation from the kernel's perspective. Driver loads, disk
detection, etc.  But it sure puts a crinkle in the beauty of a kickstart
install.

Thanks everyone for your replies.


On 02/18/2013 10:06 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 4:01 PM, Ken Teh<[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
>> During a kickstart install, how are drives mapped?  I notice that sata0 is
>> not always sda.  This is especially true when there are very large drives in
>> the mix.
>
> It Depends(tm). There are confusing difficulties because the drive
> controllers may be pre-loaded modules, which will be loaded first, and
> because the later updates or manual drivers compiled for custom
> kernels may be loaded in different order or pre-loaded with mkinitrd.
> Then as drives or RAID arrays which look like drives are detected by
> the bios starting and loading the drivers from the *boot* partition
> for adiditional controllers, they're loaded in by the order detected,
> first drive /dev/sda, second drive /dev/sdb, etc., etc. This is why
> the boot loader is usually on "/dev/sda"
>
> IDE drives used to  be listed as "/dev/ide0, /dev/ide1, etc." in
> deterministic fashion, but that got tossed out when they started
> labeling all drives as /dev/sda to gove access to special SCSI
> compatible commands.....
>
> The result is that it's guesswork. This is why our favorite upstream
> vendor tried for a while to use "LABEL=" settings to identify
> particular partitions, instead of trying to deduce what would be
> detected where.