Topic: Bending the rules to keep Windows partition

[Billy Coleman]

Just d/l the ISO image of V3.0.  Made the boot floppy.  Decided that I _really_ needed to keep the windows partitions on the existing hard drive (8GB) so I decided to bend the rules a bit.

If I am way out of line, just say "Whoa, Nelly!  You are on your own!".  But I think this ought to work:

I used Partition Magic to shrink the primary partition to less than 2G, shrunk the other two extended partitions so that there was approx 2G of space free.

Then I read the HowTo on the KickStart file and modified it as such:
zerombr no
clearpart --linux
part /boot --size 20
part /home --size 250
part /usr/local --size 750
part /tmp --size 125
part swap --size 125
part /usr --size 250
part /var --size 250
part / --size 1 --maxsize 250 --grow

lilo --append "ether=0,0,eth1" --location partition


Worked like a champ (well, after I got the sizing of the parts such that there was room for everything ).

Except ... after the packages are installed the %post commands dump error messages right before the last "Ok to reboot" screen.

Those messages that are not hidden by the message box seem to indicate that /sbin/e-smith/apply-patches could not be found (as well as all the other %post commands and something called /tmp/ks.script).

Switching over to console 2 shows that /sbin does not contain e-smith dir although /mnt/sbin does contain e-smith dir.

Now, I could edit the install floppy's ks.cfg to cd /mnt before executing the post commands (without the leading / of course) but the three e-smith shell scripts use absolute paths that would be broken.

I tried (on console 2) to ln -s /mnt/sbin /sbin but that doesn't work.  Any other suggestions?  Any one yelling "Whoa, Nelly!" ?

I am not conquered yet (just determined to do things the hard way ) ...

[Joseph Morrison]

Dear Billy, You have indeed chosen the road less travelled. No good can come of trying to keep a Windows partition on your e-smith server But it sounds like you're not far from getting it to work. Sounds like the extra partitions you've created have confused the kickstart code a little bit. But since you get all the way to the postinstall part, my suggestion would be to reboot the machine at that point (use the rescue floppy if necessary) and at the prompt type "linux single" to enter single-user mode. Then run all the kickstart postinstall commands manually at the prompt. Then when you exit that shell, it should continue as though the installation had worked perfectly. Good luck!