We are using kickstart to setup s/w RAID 1 mirrors, and are currently in the process of migrating to Phoebe and eventually will use the next official RH release. Our previous kickstart approach was to have a %pre script handle all disk partitioning and use the --onpart option. For some reason, this approach seems to no longer work, (in the process of documenting this issue and opening a bugzilla report, but I digress...), so I have been considering alternative approaches. After looking through the documentation and some preliminary testing I have a question which I hope someone on the list can answer. The idea I was pursuing was to have the %pre script read and parse the output from 'fdisk -l' and find the start and end cylinders for existing application partitions which need to be preserved and calculate the start and end for the desired size of other partitions. The issue with which I am concerned, is that fdisk reports logical geometry for the disks, i.e. 2 identical disks are often reported with different geometry. So, my question is: - For start and end cylinders within a kickstart file, should the logical geometry, such as what is reported by fdisk, be used or is there an alternate source for disk geometry? If I use the logical information from fdisk, will the resulting partitions be identical in size? I have experimented with simply using the --ondisk and --size options for creating the partitions, and the partitions created are not the exact same size. Furthermore, this option alone is not sufficient because our kickstart must preserve existing application partitions and their data, and thus must control the exact location for these partitions. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated. If anyone has an alternate approach that is proven to work, by all means, send it my way ;-) Thanks, Robert Jackson robert.jackson@xxxxxxxxxxx
