Centos – How to specify a driver disk image that is on the local cdrom

anacondacentoskickstartredhat

I have a working RedHat kickstart, but I need it to load a RAID storage driver at the outset. I have the driver for this RAID card, all packaged up in a nice driver disk image.

How do I specify (either with the kernel command line 'dd' or the kickstart 'driverdisk') that my driver.img file is on the install CDROM, and at what path? There are oblique references to being able to specify a cdrom:// location or similar, but I can't find any official documentation nor any specific working example.

This is for an unattended install where ftp/nfs/http is not an option. For obvious reasons I can't specify a hard disk partition

I strongly prefer to NOT have to rewrite the install initrd if at all possible. Is there a way to do this?

Best Answer

You can't do it that way. Anaconda won't load a driver disk from CD-ROM or DVD media, and besides, you wouldn't want to devote an entire CD/DVD to a couple of megabytes anyway. Nor will it mount a disc image file from CD/DVD media.

What you can do is to put the driver disk on a USB stick, and boot from the CD-ROM with the USB stick inserted. Organize the USB stick such that the rhdd3 file and the rpms directory are at the top level of the USB stick, and change its volume label to oemdrv. In this case the installer will automatically load the drivers from the USB stick.

(You could also do this with the installation media on a USB stick and the driver disk on a second USB stick...)