fai-cd grub menu...

[Russel Hill]

Here's the situation:

We have a several dozen legacy installations in the field. Each
installation is a pair of computers: one UI with one signal processor
(real-time). All of these are installed from a CD built with
fai-bootcd. We occasionally need to upgrade and/or reinstall software
on these machines. Currently, when the installation CD is in the drive
it automatically boots from /vmlinuz with root=/dev/hda2. If this
fails, the grub fallback causes the software to be installed (quite
useful for the signal processor which does not have either a keyboard
or a display).

Today we are working on integrating a new set of hardware. The new
machines have SATA hard drives which the older kernel would not
support. We can now flatline install on either IDE or SATA hard drives
as long as the operator has a keyboard & display connected to choose
the proper grub entry.  It will also do unattended reboots on systems
with SATA drives. However, with IDE drives, it requires a
display/keyboard and operator intervention.

1) We'd like to be able to do unattended flatline installs with fresh
hard drives.
2) We'd like to be able to boot from either SATA or IDE hard drives
with the CD in.
3) We'd like to be able to rm vmlinuz, reboot with the CD in to flatline install

We can do all of the above with SATA drives or (be reordering the grub
entries) IDE drives. But not with the same CD.

Ideally we'd also like to be able to stick this CD into a windows box
(to read release notes and such) without endangering the windows
installation. Unfortunately, this means using chainloader and I don't
think there's any way to fallback to an installation once we've
chainloaded to the hard drive.

Any thoughts or assistance are appreciated...

Thanks,
Russel Hill