So, I'm attempting to work with Novell's support, but that's turning into a slower process than I thought it would be. Here's my setup. I've got a dozen Dell SC1425 with dual drives, which I want to do software RAID on. I do not have these boxes setup for "hardware raid" which is the first caveat on them. My process was thus : 1. Use Yast2 to create an installation source (x86_64) 2. Use Yast2 to patch the installation source with SP2 3. build a server manually 4. Use Yast to create a reference file 5. Try to install . This always fails. I get one or two errors, either Error An error occurred whiel trying to create the partitioning plans. Make sure the control file has the correct syntax and values. Or An error occurred during partitioning. Now, beyond being all fancy, I've tried using : - The control file included on the SP1 cd - The control file from the yast2-autoinstall file I've tried doing these both with, and without any partitoning. I always get these errors. At one point, I believe I did actually get an autoinstall to work with no partitioning, but it's been so long I forget. This is really frustrating. When I create an reference file from a machine, then try to validate it, that should not fail, I don't even have the remote ability to break it. I am starting to believe that yast2's method of creating an installation is terribly broken. Here's what I end up with : drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 168 Aug 30 18:35 SUSE-CORE-Version-9 drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 120 Aug 30 18:47 SUSE-SLES-9-Service-Pack-Version-2 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 72 Aug 30 18:30 SUSE-SLES-Version-9 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 28 Aug 30 18:31 boot -> SUSE-SLES-Version-9/CD1/boot lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Aug 30 18:31 content -> SUSE-SLES-Version-9/CD1/content -r--r--r-- 1 root root 17621 Aug 31 00:27 control.xml lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 51 Aug 30 18:38 driverupdate -> SUSE-SLES-9-Service-Pack-Version-2/CD1/driverupdate lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 44 Aug 30 18:38 linux -> SUSE-SLES-9-Service-Pack-Version-2/CD1/linux lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 31 Aug 30 18:31 media.1 -> SUSE-SLES-Version-9/CD1/media.1 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 104 Aug 30 18:36 yast I have tried : - Booting from the initrd & kernel which comes with SLES9 - Booting from the initrd & kernel which comes with SP2 - Copying the initrd and kernel from SP2/CD1/boot into SUSE-SLES-Version-9/CD1/boot (overwriting the default) - A hundred different variations of all this. Does anybody have any good ideas before I give up?