Kickstart install error "Unable to read group information from repositories"
 

I am trying to build a Kickstart, updated install of Fedora8 for use with a hard disk install (that is I need an ISO at the end of my build process) for a machine with two hard disks (one to Kickstart from and one to install Fedora on to).

I had hoped that I could start with a Fedora8 ISO and then

1) Extract everything from the ISO to a build directory
2) rsync the updates down to a local directory
3) Merge the two sets of packages
4) Create a fresh 'repodata' directory
5) Write the build directory to an ISO
6) Put my new ISO and a ks.cfg on one hard disk and then boot with a Fedora 8 boot disk. The install would then use my updated ISO as the source for the packages.

This all seems to work until I get the following error during the installation.

Unable to read group information from repositories. This
is a problem with the generation of your install tree.

Can anyone help?


In more detail the steps I have gone through are these.

1) I have extracted everything from Fedora_8_i386_DVD.iso in to the directory /backup/hide/Fedora8 and then copied the whole of 'Fedora8' to an empty build directory. Next I remove the 'Packages' and 'repodata' directories for the build area.

# cd /backup/hide
# cp -r Fedora8 build
# cd build
# rm -rf Packages repodata
# mkdir Packages

2) I have run rsync to download all the Fedora 8 i386 updates in to
/backup/hide/Updates/i386.

3) I have downloaded novi ( www [dot] exmachinatech [dot] net/01/novi/) and run the following command to give me a new /backup/hide/build/Packages directory which contains a full set of packages (as hardlinks).

# novi -a hardlink -t /backup/hide/build/Packages /backup/hide/Fedora8/Packages /backup/hide/Updates/i386
Loading RPMs from source /backup/hide/Fedora8/Packages
Now 1981 products loaded (1981 RPMs)
Loading RPMs from source /backup/hide/Updates/i386
Now 4303 products loaded (4996 RPMs)
Total 4303 products to process, from 4996 RPMs

4) Now make a repository for Packages

# cd /backup/hide/build
# mkdir repodata
# createrepo -o /backup/hide/build /backup/hide/build/Packages

5) Build an ISO image of my build directory. Note I don't need the ISO to be bootable nor do I care if the ISO is 'too large' to write to a DVD as I just need the ISO to be available to the Kickstart process.

# mkisofs -J -R -v -V Fedora8-updated -o /backup/Fedora8-updated.iso /backup/hide/build

6) Place Fedora8-updated.iso and ks.cfg in the root directory of the data disk and reboot with the Fedora 8 boot disk in the DVD drive.
At the menu select "Install or upgrade an existing system" and add the ks parameter to the boot statement giving

> vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img ks=hd:sdb1:/ks.cfg

The system proceeds to boot. I get the blue "Welcome to Fedora for i386" screen and Anaconda starts. The X server starts and I get a progress bar with the text “Retrieving installation information”. Then I get the error

"Unable to read group information from repositories. This is a problem with the generation of your install tree."

On tty3 the last three lines of logging are

INFO : moving (1) to step reposetup
INFO : added repository Additional Fedora Software with source URL [None]
WARNING : /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/yum/repos.py:63: RuntimeWarning: YumProgress.progressbar called when popped
self.callback.progressbar(num, len(repos), repo.id)


Any help would be appreciated.


Gavin

check out a guy in urbana IL google bench mark computers he does recycle computers his real thing is total secure servers years ago he built the linux systems that run like you want. instead of two drives he does this with three. will one system is running the it wiil reload another into ram then burn on to a wr cd. I know this isnt what you want but he is very good at what you want. he can run total secure servers in ram and rebuild the whole system at the same time his system are never down wild stuff kick it.