For iscsi install work, current partition dev nodes are being created under /tmp rather than /dev, like /tmp/sda5. In short this causes the os.stat() in mkDevRoot to fail. So, create the corresponding /dev entry prior to the creation of /dev/root. I think in this case the creation of the /tmp node is done in the call to makeDevInode via the PartitionDevice setupDevice method, but I did not verify that; changing it to default to /dev could fix this particular case, but it looks like there might be other cases that could still break. diff -uprN -X /home/patman/dontdiff anaconda-10.91.12/fsset.py iscsi-anaconda-10.91.12/fsset.py --- anaconda-10.91.12/fsset.py 2006-02-01 14:13:48.000000000 -0800 +++ iscsi-anaconda-10.91.12/fsset.py 2006-02-03 10:12:39.000000000 -0800 @@ -1275,6 +1275,7 @@ MAILADDR root def mkDevRoot(self, instPath): root = self.getEntryByMountPoint("/") dev = "%s/dev/%s" % (instPath, root.device.getDevice()) + isys.makeDevInode(root.device.getDevice(), dev) rdev = os.stat(dev).st_rdev os.mknod("%s/dev/root" % (instPath,), stat.S_IFBLK | 0600, rdev)