RHEL 5.5 and 6.0 Installation Failure on DL380 G4 and Older

[Randy Goddard]

I hope this will make someone else's day. After spending a number of hours on this problem, I'll post up-front the solution/workaround I've found.

SOLUTION:
isolinux.cfg configuration stanza:
label rackmount
kernel vmlinuz
append ks=hd:scd0:/ks-local.cfg initrd=initrd.img

PROBLEM:
When installing RHEL 5.5 or RHEL 6.0 on DL380 G4s and older (via virtual CDROM), the error, "Cannot find kickstart file on CDROM." is returned.

TROUBLESHOOTING STEPS:
Switching to tty3 shows that the first CDROM the system is trying to access is /dev/hda and the message, "ERROR: failed to mount /dev/hda: No medium found" is seen. Back at tty1, if the error message is accepted, the dialog box for input of an alternate kickstart location is shown. Sometimes, simply removing 'cdrom:/', letting it fail again, then entering it back in would work--but not consistently. When it would work, tty3 would show that it found the CDROM as scd0, so entering hd:scd0:/ in place of cdrom:/ in the dialog box worked. Changing the stanza in isolinux.cfg seems to have solved the problem.

[JoeG1484]

Good find, and it did fix an issue I had... 

However, I wanted to note that the machine I was working on was a DL380 G7 machine.

Thanks for the work!!!

Joe