Hi Anas, Thank you for replying so quickly. Unfortunately I was expecting your answer. my most recent attempt was to force a reboot of the computer (system call) when my script partitions the disk so that (I hoped) the computer would then net boot a second time, a valid partition table would exist and things would be OK. Unfortunately that does not work as a valid partition table (without a bootable flag) is still viewed as bootable by the PC - darn. I will now try the rules based install - thanks for the suggestion. I hope you will document that the pre-install script is not a true pre-install script as insatllation decisions have already been made by autoyast about the installation it will perform before the pre-install script has beene executed. Interestingly Redhat kickstart does allow one to mess around with the partition table in a pre-install script. OK, I've now tried the rules based install and I cannot get it to work: The control file: default linux label linux kernel linux append load_ramdisk=1 initrd=initrd autoyast=nfs://172.24.25.29/install/suse9.1/autoyast/ install=nfs://1 72.24.25.29/install/suse9.1/Suse/ textmode=1 The rules directory as specified by http://www.suse.de/~nashif/autoinstall/9.1/html/rulesandclass.html : -bash-2.05b# pwd /install/suse9.1/autoyast/rules -bash-2.05b# ls -l total 24 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6605 Jun 17 15:48 ay_create_partitions.xml -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1690 Jun 17 15:32 ay_make_part -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5801 Jun 17 15:29 ay_partitioned.xml -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 776 Jun 17 15:42 rules.xml The rules file is being read by something (ls -lu tells me) when the install is attempted, but I am told that no valid control file is found. Maybe my rules.xml is at fault: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE autoinstall SYSTEM "/usr/share/autoinstall/dtd/rules.dtd"> <autoinstall xmlns="http://www.suse.com/1.0/yast2ns" xmlns:config="http://www.suse.com/1.0/configns"> <rules config:type="list"> <rule> <linux> <match>0</match> <match_type>greater</match_type> </linux> <result> <profile>ay_partitioned.xml</profile> <continue config:type="boolean">false</continue> </result> <linux> <match>0</match> <match_type>exact</match_type> </linux> <result> <profile>ay_create_partitions.xml</profile> <continue config:type="boolean">false</continue> </result> </rule> </rules> </autoinstall> The HDD on the destination computer does have a valid partition table so the first rule should be picked up whereby there are more than 0 linux partitions, I think. I've taken a guess at the match type for the other situation where no partitions are defined "exact" although I cannot see a complete list of defined match types in the documentation (unfortunately), but this should not matter as I want it to pick up the other one anyway. cheers, Mike Rose On Wed, 16 Jun 2004, Anas Nashif wrote:
Hi, You cant combine sfdisk with autoyast partitioning or at least it is very difficultand to accomplish what you want. If you are using a recent release, you can use rules to detect the type of the harddisk you are using and have different partitioning schemes for the various disks depending on the size of the disks.