Can I do a re-install from grub's menu.lst? hard to explain...

Discussion in 'Installation/Configuration' started by reapur, Jun 3, 2009.

  1. reapur

    reapur New Member

    trying to rebuild a server from grub/menu.lst
    Hi,
    I have a network installation working perfectly. I can install over pxe without any problems at all.

    What I need to do is the following.
    I have a server that has already been installed via pxe. We use this server for testing and we need to rebuild it all the time.
    So instead of having to walk into the computer room to access the console and hit F12 for pxe boot (sorry, no KVM available) I would like to add an entry to the /boot/grub/menu.lst file that will effectively do a network boot.

    I have done this on a SLES 10 server with no problems.

    I've been trying with RHEL 5.3 for a couple of days and it's driving me crazy right about now.

    Now I can't find any documentation on how to do it so I'm using what I did for SLES as a starting point.

    On the DVD there are pxe vmlinuz and initrd.img files that I'm assuming I have to use. so I copy them to /boot and try the following (because if I use the existing files, the server just boots normally) inside the menu.lst file:

    # installRHEL53.1.1
    title Redhat Install from network
    # root (hd0,0)
    kernel /boot/vmlinuz
    initrd=/boot/initrd.img ks=ftp://x.x.x.x/pub/linux/REDHAT/R53.1.1
    /zks.cfg

    The idea is to boot the server and select the "install from network" option from the grub menu and have it do a new install.

    So here are the problems that I'm having.
    If I use just boot with the above syntax, it won't read the ks file and proceeds to do an interactive install.
    if I preceed initrd with 'append' I get a kernel panic at boot.

    What am I supposed to do? how do I get this simple thing to work?

    Thanks for all the help

    Cheers
     
    reapur, Jun 3, 2009
    #1
  2. reapur

    reapur New Member

    So why does

    # installRHEL53.1.1
    title Redhat Install from network
    # root (hd0,0)
    kernel /boot/vmlinuz
    append initrd=/boot/initrd.img ks=ftp://x.x.x.x/pub/linux/REDHAT/R53.1.1
    /zks.cfg

    cause kernel panic? I've looked thru the docs for grub.conf and it seems that we can used append initrd.
    Even if I just do

    # installRHEL53.1.1
    title Redhat Install from network
    # root (hd0,0)
    kernel /boot/vmlinuz
    initrd=/boot/initrd.img

    it results in kernel panic.

    any ideas?
    Thanks,
     
    reapur, Jun 8, 2009
    #2

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