How to know number/types of drives and NIC?
 

Hi all,

I hope I post in the correction forum.

I need to know how many number/types of drives (sata or ide) and NIC card for a clean new installation.
OS: centos 4.4_64 bit

how do I do that?
1. read off BIOS?
how? if I need to write script to do that, what command do invoke to call BIOS information?

2. read off dmesg?
how do i do that if the drives is a clean installation?


3. if there is a better solution, please help.

thanks so much,
esuparno

The BIOS can show this by a number of means in most cases, the easiest to use the key for your system to enter into the BIOS (maybe the 'DEL' key or F2 key) when the very first splash screen is displayed at power on.

Boot the system using the Installation media into rescue mode by typing 'linux rescue' minus the single quotemarks when the CentOS menu screen is displayed.

When done booting use the commands;

lspci -v
fdisk -l


thanks so much,
esuparno[/QUOTE]

Thank you for the answer.

Maybe I did not explain too clearly.

I want to do a new "clean" custom installation by having multiple kickstart files.
when the computer boot from a CD, it will automatically read off "appropriate" kickstart file without having user to touch the keyboard (unattended).

For example, machine has 2 sata drives.
I have kickstart files such as sata.cfg, ide.cfg, etc.
in boot time, the machine will detect on its own which to choose base on number of drives and type of drives. Of course i will need to create a script to probe devices (using e.g. 'dmesg') or its even better if I connect to bios and read device information.
But how?
is there a way?


thanks,
esuparno

I think I found the solution.

I need to modify the image file of centos to call some script before calling kickstart.
But now, where can I find the source code (uncompiled) image for centos 4.4?

Is there a better solution?
Help is highly appeciated


thanks,
esuparno