On Feb 19, 2013, at 13:38 , Ken Teh <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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.

You could detect the disk you want to install on in %pre, write the partitioning info into a file int /tmp, and %include that from your main ks config.

> 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.

-- 
Stephan Wiesand
DESY - DV -
Platanenallee 6
15732 Zeuthen, Germany