usb drive recognized as sda or sdb in kickstart

[bp787]

I am performing a kickstart install on CentOS 6.5 from USB. The problem I'm having is that I auto-generate the isolinux.cfg files which dictates where the kickstart file is located (i.e. on which drive), but it seems that the usb drive is sometimes recognized as sda, sometimes as sdb. This is dependent upon which computer I am installing on. It makes it very difficult to generate the isolinux file. is there any way to force the system to recognize the drive as sda or sdb everytime?

also, as a note: if you are rebuilding the iso for installation on a USB drive/key, be sure to run isohybrid on the iso after running makeiso. took me quite awhile to find that it is required to make the usb drive bootable. I've mostly been working with CDs lately and completely missed that requirement

[bp787]

any suggestions? I've seen nothing except doing some serious modification efforts...

[TrevorH]

It is absolutely not required to regenerate the iso. That sounds more like you are using one of the broken tools to copy it to the USB stick. Just use dd.

For your actual problem, use ks=hd:UUID=ede47e6c-8b5f-49ad-9509-774fa7119281:ks.cfg from the fine manual https://access.redhat.com/documentation ... ation.html

[bp787]

thanks for the reply.

I'm not regenerating the iso. Well, actually I am. I am heavily modifying the iso with additional packages, files, etc... Thus, I have to rebuild the iso

using the uuid of the drive is an option, but I just stumbled on: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/ ... stallation.

Since the creation of the usb drive gives me a known drive/partition label value (my build is scripted), I can use: ks=hd:LABEL=LIVE:ks/ks.cfg as well.


Thanks for the tip!

[bp787]

It took me awhile to get back to this, but the solution, for me anyway, was to use drive LABELs. LABELS are easy to remember/use and solve this problem quite nicely when kickstarting from USB.

I have put a complete write up here:

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=51434