Finsen’s Blog

Since floppy disks are things of the past, USB flash drives are becoming a more reliable and popular storage media.  I needed to do a kickstart install of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL4) on a Dell PowerEdge 680 server.  My friend and I put the kickstart file in a floppy before realizing that the machine does not have a floppy drive.  So using a USB flash drive seemed to be the next most accessible and reasonable option.  After some researching on the Internet, we finally come up with the solution. 

First, boot up from the install CD. 

Press CRTL+ALT+F2 to enter the command shell.
(The first time I was able to access the command shell was at the Choose Language screen)

At the command prompt, type in:  cat proc/scsi/scsi

This will list the attached storage devices; a USB flash drive is being recognized as a SCSI device.  The order of the list gives the drive letter of the device. 
For example, the first storage device will be a, the second storage device will be b, etc…
(Note: Do not count CD drives)

For our case, the machine’s hard drive was first on the list, so it had the drive letter, a; the USB flash drive was the second storage drive, so it was b.

Then, reboot and go back to the boot: prompt.

At the boot: prompt, type in:  linux ks=hd:<device name>:/ks.cfg

<device name> has the format sd<drive letter><partition number>.

e.g.  In our case, we typed in:  linux ks=hd:sdb1:/ks.cfg

The <drive letter> is determined in the previous step. 
The 1 denotes the partition number of the flash drive.  In our case, there is only one partition in the flash drive, and the ks.cfg file resides in the flash drive’s root directory.

Since my friend and I were not able to find any specific information relevant to our machine, I decided to make this entry hoping that it would be useful to others.