Hi Charles, Thanks for swift responses. I think I am struggling to explain this well. I am talking about the actual directory *during* install. It is nothing to do with the real disk in terms of the partitions required - I have this working. Bascialy I am trying to split the RPM's out of the install source. The "root" filesystem I am talking about is the 60MB cramfs file in the /boot/ directory of the installation media. It is this I would like to load of CD while fetching the RPM's from an HTTP server? As you say this is loaded by initrd/linuxrc which also sets up the install configuration in /etc/install.inf which is passed to YaST after the cramfs root has been loaded. What I am after is a way to load the cramfs root from CD but pass the correct information to YaST so that it fetches the RPM's from a web server. So I guess this is really a question out the way initrd/linuxrc load YaST ;-) Thanks for your help, Nick. -----Original Message----- From: Suffin, Charles [mailto:Charles.Suffin@stratus.com] Posted At: 01 February 2005 11:38 Posted To: Nick-Forbes.SPAM Conversation: [suse-autoinstall] Hybrid Auto Install (CD - FTP/HTTP) Subject: RE: [suse-autoinstall] Hybrid Auto Install (CD - FTP/HTTP) Nick, I'm out of my depth so I'll stay off the main mailing list, but here are my thoughts: I think YaST needs to form a "proposal" for the installation, which I think is what autoYaST does from the XML file before driving YaST. My experience says you can leave off all the details in the XML with regard to the disk partitioning, and then autoYaST sets up a default proposal for boot (/boot), root (/), and swap automatically for you. If you specify the individual partition information, you can override the default (I do that, for example, to increase the size of /boot for my kernel developers)... After YaST formats the partitions on the disk for you, it then mounts the root as /mnt and proceeds to install all the RPMs that make up the desired install. So, I don't really understand what you are trying to do. Ultimately, I think the root is created from scratch by YaST and then populated by the zillion RPMs in the distro. If you're talking about the actual / directory *during* the installation (before reboot), then perhaps you're referring to the initrd that remains in effect as YaST performs the install. If you wanted to change that from the one that SuSE supplies, you could definitely do that -- but that has nothing to do with the real disk on the system you're installing. Sorry for the confusion. Hope some of this is useful. -- Charlie _____________________________________________________________________ VirusChecked for the Incepta Group plc _____________________________________________________________________