[ipxe-devel] sanboot and cdrom reference for kickstart

[Robin Smidsrød]

On 02.12.2013 21:12, Larry Brigman wrote:
> I have an ISO image that is a rebuilt centos 5 images
> that has a custom kickstart file on the image.  I have
> modified the isolinux.cfg to reference this kickstart file.
> 
> This works correctly for the booted ISO but not from
> ipxe sanboot.

This is just how things work. You're not doing anything wrong. When the
Linux kernel has started up it is no longer able to access the
"emulated" CD-ROM iPXE sets up. This is because Linux uses its own
drivers that ignore anything from the BIOS. You'll need to configure
your CentOS installer to load the remaining files from a network
location, most likely NFS. Not sure how you do it in CentOS, but in
Debian/Ubuntu you can look at the casper man page for details.

All: We should really get a FAQ entry up on this one. It's one of the
most recurring newbie questions around.

> Here is my ipxe line
> sanboot --keep --drive 0x80 http://10.109.0.46/repo/${iso}
> 
> The error message I get from the anaconda installer is
> No CDROM devices found!
> 
> It looks like the sanboot gets the full image but not as a cdrom device
> so is there some emulation that needs to be enabled?
> 
> BTW rescue mode using sanboot method works well.

That is because it works completely from the initrd which is in memory
and passed to the kernel from iPXE when it's booted.

-- Robin