I have been working on doing an automated install by booting off of the SLES 11 SP2 DVD1 and passing “autoyast=usb:///mysystem.xml”.
While I have been able to make it work, I ran into multiple issues caused by the installer detecting the USB stick as /dev/sda and the hard drive as /dev/sdb. After rebooting without the USB stick the hard drive of course becomes /dev/sda and various things fail. Thanks to SUSE support, I know what to modify in the XML files by hand, but it does obfuscate the intent of the actual installation. I have also had trouble with the “Autoyast installer” tool on OpenSUSE 12 giving me a non-working installation if I use it to edit other parts of the configuration. Does anyone have any solutions for getting the hard drives detected first instead of the USB stick?
This isn’t really urgent since I’m able to do network installs, but being able to do an install without a network connection (or one that can’t reach the tftp server & repository) would be quite convenient in some cases.
On Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:54:01 +0000, n5red wrote:
[color=blue]
Does anyone have any solutions for getting the hard drives detected
first instead of the USB stick?[/color]
Don’t configure to use device by name, use device by ID instead if you
can. You’ll probably still have to tell it to use the first non-flash
drive device by name, but IIRC you can specify when creating the
installation that you set up the fstab and grub entries using by device,
and then it should just work.
On Tue, 07 Aug 2012 21:44:01 +0000, n5red wrote:
[color=blue]
I’m still new to using SUSE and trying autoinstalls. I’m not quite sure
how to set them up by device.[/color]
Probably the easiest way to do this would be to run through the
installation and then at the end export the autoyast config (as I recall,
there’s an option to do that when nearing the completion of the install).
The default setup /should/ (depending on the version) automatically use
the by-ID rather than by-device convention.
Part of that process should also let you set it up so the IP address can
be requested during the installation once the Autoyast script is going.
It’s been a while since I looked at it, but I seem to remember that you
get the option to have various optional configuration items set during
the firstboot process.