[NTLUG:Discuss] adding drivers to RH 7 install diskette

[sysmail@glade.net]

Howdy,

Being still but a callow youth, I find I sometimes do things the hard way.
Any suggestions as to how to do this an easier way greatly appreciated!

I wanted to install RH 7 on a box with an Advansys based SCSI contoller,
which is directly supported by RH 7, but is not included in the default
configuration.

Furthermore, I looked at mkinitrd and decided it wasn't really what I was
looking for, since I needed to modify the install-time environment, not
the boot-time.

Kind of consolidating the steps I took, first I made a larger version of
drivers.img called mydrivers.img:

dd if=/dev/zero of=mydrivers.img bs=1024 count=1024
losetup /dev/loop0 mydrivers.img
mkfs -t ext2 /dev/loop0
mount -t ext2 /dev/loop0 mydrv-mount
losetup /dev/loop1 drivers.img
mount -t ext2 /dev/loop1 drv-mount
cp -R drv-mount/* mydrv-mount

Then, I edited mydrv-mount/modinfo, adding these three lines (the advansys
driver requires no parameters):

advansys
	scsi
	"Advansys SCSI"

I took a chance on the dependencies of advansys.o, and did nothing to
modules.dep.

Then, from the parent directory of mydrv-mount, I extracted the
modules.cgz file from the driver image disk with:

zcat mydrv-mount/modules.cgz | cpio -i

That created a new directory '2.2.16-22BOOT'.  At this point, I ran 'make
menuconfig' and 'make modules' to add support for SCSI and Advansys (my
box has IDE, it's the new computer I want to install on).  Then, I copied
advansys.o into the new 2.2.16-22BOOT directory.

Finally, I recreated mydrv-mount/modules.cgz and wrote to diskette with
this:

rm mydrv-mount/modules.cgz
find 2.2.16-22BOOT -name "*" | cpio -o | gzip > mydrv-mount/modules.cgz
umount mydrv-mount
losetup -d /dev/loop0
dd if=mydrivers.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024

Then, I ran the install in 'expert' mode and the Advansys entry was in the
setup menu. I picked it, and the installation ran just fine.

But is this a valid approach?

Regards,

Carl

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Carl Haddick
sysmail at glade.net
GladeNet Communications