CentOS - Apr 2014 - cannot kickstart centos 6 on Dell Blade error cannot find c0t0

I have an intermittent problem with my Dell blades, out of 80 blades 69 
of them kickstarted Centos 6 fine using PXE
The other 11, I get a   c0t0 not found error  (indicating it is not 
finding the local disk on the blade).

I can remote mount the iso image and do a basic install of centos on 
these blades, but when I go to do a pxe boot it gives me that error again.

I have googled the issue and come up empty handed. Dell told us to 
install centos 6 minimal ISO  then pxe install the server. This has been 
unsuccessful. I get the local ISO to install but the pxe fails again.

Since the kickstart file defines the disk as sda1  I am supposing that 
it is really a hardware problem.
But I am told by coworkers who handed it off to me that it is a known 
issue with centos and Dell blades.

These are two internal disks on the blade.

Any suggestions?

-- 
  
Dan

Dan Hyatt wrote:
> I have an intermittent problem with my Dell blades, out of 80 blades 69
> of them kickstarted Centos 6 fine using PXE
> The other 11, I get a   c0t0 not found error  (indicating it is not
> finding the local disk on the blade).
<snip>
> Since the kickstart file defines the disk as sda1  I am supposing that
> it is really a hardware problem.
<snip>
Nahhh... First, I suspect that those 11 blades are a slightly different 
model - newer, or whatever. When we first got some Dell R720s was when we
ran into CentOS calling the NIC em1 instead of eth0, while *other*
R-series servers we got the same time were still eth0.

I'm afraid you're going to have to put conditionals into the ks, or
maybe,
the way we do, write a CGI that creates one on the fly, to tell it to look
for those drives under those names. *shrug* We did just that in our CGI,
and chose CentOS 6, 64 bit, R720 for them.

        mark

On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 4:04 PM, Dan Hyatt <dhyatt at dsgmail.wustl.edu>
wrote:
> I have an intermittent problem with my Dell blades, out of 80 blades 69
> of them kickstarted Centos 6 fine using PXE
> The other 11, I get a   c0t0 not found error  (indicating it is not
> finding the local disk on the blade).
>
> I can remote mount the iso image and do a basic install of centos on
> these blades, but when I go to do a pxe boot it gives me that error again.
>
> I have googled the issue and come up empty handed. Dell told us to
> install centos 6 minimal ISO  then pxe install the server. This has been
> unsuccessful. I get the local ISO to install but the pxe fails again.
>
> Since the kickstart file defines the disk as sda1  I am supposing that
> it is really a hardware problem.
> But I am told by coworkers who handed it off to me that it is a known
> issue with centos and Dell blades.
>
> These are two internal disks on the blade.
>
> Any suggestions?


install "working" blade from .iso
install "non-working" blade from .iso
diff anaconda-ks.cfg.working ananconda-ks.cfg.non-working