> -----Original Message----- > From: Douglas Alan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, March 25, 2003 12:38 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: "Remove all existing partitions" > > > Emmanuel Seyman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > It could start by not zeroing partitions on disk drives > uninvolved in > > > the OS installation, since there is no reason for it to do that. > > > This is the part where I don't follow you. If partitions have not > > been created, how is the kickstart program supposed to know which > > drives are involved in the installation and which ones are not? > > I'm not sure I understand your confusion -- the answer to this is > obvious: Clearly Kickstart knows which disk drives it is going to put > partitions onto before it does so. Such is a logical > requirement, or it > would never be able to issue the "mkfs" command that actually does the > work of creating a new filesystem. All Kickstart has to do to behave > properly here is to refrain from issuing an "fdisk" command > for the very > same disk drives for which it refrains from issuing "mkfs" commands. > > Furthermore, in the specific case we were talking about, I told > Kickstart to put partitions *only* on hda. Therefore, it knew well in > advance that the only drive involved in the installation was hda.
Doug, I've read these messages and I've come to a conclusion: You are one of those people who screws up, and then says "I'm the innocent victim! It's somebody else's fault!" Flat out, you are WRONG with your constant ragging about how Kickstart is messed up; you didn't know what you were doing (because you thought you did, and didn't read the Man pages or the docs to confirm it worked the way you thought) and decided that since YOU wanted it to work in a certain way, it MUST work that way. I'm about to be in the EXACT scenario you are mentioning, except for one thing: I need the drive to install the OS on to /dev/hdb, not /dev/hda. I have machines that already have an OS installed, and on THOSE machines, Linux is a guest in a dual boot system. By >YOUR< rational, if I try to tell kickstart to build these systems, it'll blitz /dev/hda and leave /dev/hdb alone. Nope, not the right answer. I want it to install to /dev/hdb, and not /dev/hda, so I need to tell it not to blitz the drives, and to install to /dev/hdb. By configuring it BEFORE I start, with knowledge of EXACTLY what I want it to do. Kickstart is only as intelligent as the person who set up the kickstart file. On the other hand, in a few months, I'm going to want it to blitz a different group of machines entirely; erase every drive, mount the root drive, and allow me to come back later and mount the newly slicked drives (variable to each machine, in that case) where I want them for data (using LVM, I'll probably make them one spanned disk). Different criteria. But >I< need to figure out exactly what I want with kickstart... it'll do it, but only if I tell it exactly how. And who knows, I might be able to figure out a way to get LVM to create the spanned volume in kickstart without knowing a priori what drives and sizes are available... which means I wouldn't even need to do the LVM by hand. A tool is only as good as the person wielding it; in this case, you need to admit the truth and say "Mea Culpa". -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
