Topic: Custom ISO and Reinstallation Floppy - md5sum

[jfarschman]

Hi,

  If you build a custom ISO and this changes the checksum of your CD, what do you need to do to get the reinstall floppy to work?

  I just built a system from a Custom ISO (that I made to include some contribs that I use all the time) and then went to test the restore.  It failed with the message:

"The second stage of the install which you have selected does not match the boot disk you are using"

This error appears a few times on the forums and the md5sum appears to be the problem.  Sure enough, my checksum does not match the original ISO.  For those reading this message like a riddle checksums prove your cd is bit-for-bit identical and can be found here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/smeserver/index.php?subdir=releases%2F6.0.1%2Fiso&sortby=name
9914d7e67b3c456f44fe2e540139f417

So, do I need to change the reinstall floppy to recognize my ISO?  What causes the misalignment?  Thanks for your help.

[wellsi]

I think that it is probably the .buildstamp

http://no.longer.valid/mantis/bug_view_advanced_page.php?bug_id=0000067

[jfarschman]

Very cool,

  Thank you.  I'm going to test this out this evening and see if it works.  

[jfarschman]

Okay...

  The .buildstamps really must match. That makes all the difference.  Sadly, the "create reinstall disk" process seems to create a mismatched .buildstamp.  I just went through the entire process again and my new restore CD has the old stamp

mount /mnt/floppy
gzip -dc /mnt/floppy/initrd.img > /tmp/initrd.ext2
mkdir -p /tmp/z
cd /tmp
mount -o loop initrd.ext2 /tmp/z
vi /tmp/z/.buildstamp (shows 200401102303)

  Any idea where this is controlled in the build process for the floppy?  I've looked around for this (00401102303) datestamp in every file on my hard drive and I just cannot figure out where that outdate stamp comes from.

[wellsi]

Today I managed to make an ISO that appears to work - altough I did not try the floppy support.

This taught me that it is very easy to miss some of the .img files & therefore .buildstamps in the initrd.img files

The three main areas to check before compiling the ISO are:

.../images
.../RedHat/base
.../dosutils/autoboot

That last one swallowed up a day of my time

If making new .ISOs it might be worth reading bug 101 which appears to highlight a missing ks.cfg for floppy installs. http://no.longer.valid/mantis/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=0000101