From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

Description of problem:
I have a very minimal ks.cfg that installs very few packages.  I have a farm of
about 50 Dell PowerEdge 2650's.  On the first 30 or so, the BIOS revision was
A10 and the kickstart worked flawlessly every time.  After I updated the BIOS to
A15, my kickstart would die at the point where kernel-smp is installed. 
Specifically, process ID number 279 (regardless of server being kicked, it was
always PID 279):

/bin/bash/sbin/new-kernel-pkg - - mkinitrd - - depmod - - install

Killing this PID, #279, causes the installation to resume.

Note the only difference at all in these 2650's is the BIOS.  There is something
with A15 that causes the kernel-smp kernel to not get installed.  However, I
noticed in my %post I upgrade kernel-smp to e.27 and this works fine.  I
theorized that the problem, whatever it was, did not exist in e.27.  So I went
into my kickstart tree and 'rm -f kernel*e.24*'.  I imported the e.27 kernel
updates, glibc-kernheaders, and the glibc updates.  I edited the comps file in
my base directory and replaced kernel-headers with glibc-kernheaders.  I then
regenerated my genhdlist like so:

/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/genhdlist --withnumbers --hdlist hdlist /mnt/rhes2.1

I rekicked my boxes with A15 on them and all works now.

In effect, I make anaconda install the e.27 kernels instead of the e.24's in
update 2 and this fixes the problems.  This problem will likely be resolved if
there's ever an update 3 for RHEL AS 2.1.  Otherwise you guys might want to work
with Dell to resolve this.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
kernel-smp-e.24

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
See above.
    

Additional info: