Background: The "new" tulip driver is rather flakey on all our varients of tulips. The old_tulip driver is rock solid - at least this is the case in 2.2.15pre14 or so. For a kickstart over NFS to work better than 1 time in 3 I need to force the use of the old_tulip driver. RH very kindly put it in the install package. However it cannot be loaded in a kickstart install because the PCI sniffing finds a tulip and loads the tulip driver in early in the process. Any device statements don't work because the tulip and old_tulip drivers do not co-exist. Workround was to extra the initrd.img file off the boot set, and rebuild modules.cgz swapping over tulip and old_tulip. What fun :-)
If you boot the installer with the 'noprobe' option does that help?
I'm in a similar boat here. But in my case kickstart thinks that the de4x5 driver is the one to use. The tulip driver is the one I want so as listed above and as I did in rh 6.0 I added noprobe to the ks.cfg file as well as the line device ethernet tulip to the file. This does not appear to work as it errors out saying that it was unable to insert the tulip driver because the device was busy because it still insmoded the d34x5 driver. It also reports that the "noprobe" line caused the installer to error as it is not valid. I also noticed that the doc with rh 6.2 lacks any mention of "noprobe" in it, or maybe I'm just blind. Ideas?
I've gotten bit by this too -- de4x5 driver was installed even though I specified wanted tulip.
7.0 lets you override this stuff properly.