CentOS - Mar 2007 - kickstart from harddisk to harddisk?

Please help with a problem that is slowly driving me nuts :-/

*Quick problem*
Can I kickstart an install by reading all the files from a single partition on 
the system and installing onto all the spare space on the same drive?

I am using `harddrive --partition=sda1 --dir=/` but it doesn't seem to
work!!

*Longer version*
I have a server that has no CD-ROM and that I would like to install a custom 
version of CentOS onto.  This is supplied as an ISO image.  The server is in a 
datacentre so I can't setup other machines to boot off however a single boot
server is available for diagnostics only.

So far I have
- Netbooted the machine
- Wiped all partitions and created a single 800MB partition
- Made this ext2 (kickstart seems to need ext2)
- Mounted this drive and downloaded the ISO to it
- Mounted the ISO as loopback
- Copied all the data from the ISO into the disk
- Setup extlinux and used the isolinux config
- Modified the kickstart file...
Changed `cdrom` to `harddrive --partition=sda1 --dir=/`
Removed the line `clearpart --all`
- Reboot

Now, the system boots from disk, vmlinuz and initrd.img both unpack and execute 
fine!  (so the syslinux/extlinux seems to be working great) and pages of system 
startup scroll past.  It seems to then start asking for questions that should be
covered by the kickstart file including asking where all the files are on the 
disk and then showing me the disk with all the files on! :-/

"What partition and directory on that partition hold the CD (iso9660)
images"

After all of this I feel so close yet so far!

Thank you very much in advance

Dan

Dogsbody spake the following on 3/23/2007 5:27 PM:
> 
> Please help with a problem that is slowly driving me nuts :-/
> 
> *Quick problem*
> Can I kickstart an install by reading all the files from a single
> partition on the system and installing onto all the spare space on the
> same drive?
> 
> I am using `harddrive --partition=sda1 --dir=/` but it doesn't seem to
> work!!
> 
> *Longer version*
> I have a server that has no CD-ROM and that I would like to install a
> custom version of CentOS onto.  This is supplied as an ISO image.  The
> server is in a datacentre so I can't setup other machines to boot off
> however a single boot server is available for diagnostics only.
> 
> So far I have
> - Netbooted the machine
> - Wiped all partitions and created a single 800MB partition
> - Made this ext2 (kickstart seems to need ext2)
> - Mounted this drive and downloaded the ISO to it
> - Mounted the ISO as loopback
> - Copied all the data from the ISO into the disk
> - Setup extlinux and used the isolinux config
> - Modified the kickstart file...
> Changed `cdrom` to `harddrive --partition=sda1 --dir=/`
> Removed the line `clearpart --all`
> - Reboot
> 
> Now, the system boots from disk, vmlinuz and initrd.img both unpack and
> execute fine!  (so the syslinux/extlinux seems to be working great) and
> pages of system startup scroll past.  It seems to then start asking for
> questions that should be covered by the kickstart file including asking
> where all the files are on the disk and then showing me the disk with
> all the files on! :-/
> 
> "What partition and directory on that partition hold the CD (iso9660)
> images"
> 
> After all of this I feel so close yet so far!
> 
> Thank you very much in advance
> 
> Dan
The last time I did a hd to hd install was in RedHat 9, but I seem to remember
just having the ISO image on the hard drive, and anaconda loop mounted it and
ran.

I just looked it up in the install docs;
http://www.centos.org/docs/4/html/rhel-ig-x8664-multi-en-4/s1-steps-hd-install.html


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