If you have a kickstart file which installs onto an iscsi device without partitions: network xxxx iscsiname iqn.2011-01.foo.bar:root.xs2 iscsi --ipaddr=131.111.68.133 bootloader --location=none part / --noformat --onpart /dev/disk/by-path/ip-xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:3260-iscsi-iqn.2011-01.foo.bar:root.xs2-lun-1 --fstype ext4 --size 1 --grow --label=/ ignoredisk --only-use=/dev/disk/by-path/ip-xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:3260-iscsi-iqn.2011-01.foo.bar:root.xs2-lun-1 This fails if you leave out the "--noformat", giving an exception saying that (in this case) /dev/sdb cannot be formatted. I think this is because the mkfs.ext4 command doesn't like to run on disks, rather than partitions, and you have force it to do this. If you use the "--noformat" option, the install fails trying to install a bootloader on line 951 in bootloader.py self.stage1_device.isDisk The exception is that a NoneType object doesn't have an isDisk attribute.
Another workaround that doesn't actually work is adding a pre script to do the formatting; this fails because Anaconda will then check if the disk has a correct disklabel and not figure it out.
Please attach /tmp/anaconda.log and /tmp/storage.log from your failed attempt to this bug report.
Created attachment 538499 [details] storage.log when using "part" with "--noformat"
Created attachment 538500 [details] anaconda.log when using "part" with "--noformat"
Created attachment 538501 [details] anaconda.log without noformat, giving error in formatting Note that these were made with a virtual machine. The same errors were encountered with a real system.
Created attachment 538503 [details] storage.log without using --noformat
Anaconda does not support formatting unpartitioned disks in any way other than by putting a partition table on them. If you insist on using filesystems on unpartitioned disks you will have to do the formatting in %pre.
What about the second bug, where if you put --noformat you get a crash when it tries to install a bootloader, even if location is set to None (see attached log files). I think this is still a bug. If the part commands on a root disk isn't supported (it would be pretty easy to support this by adding -f to the mkfs command line), wouldn't it be better to give a diagnostic error message? The main reason why we're using unpartitioned iscsi devices is because you can't manipulate devices-inside-devices on the iscsi hosting target server, if you need to. Linux doesn't see partitions inside partitions. Also, it is very hard to get the system to boot using PXE because the root-path dhcp option doesn't support a partition number.
Yeah, feel free to open a separate bug for that separate issue.
OK, followed up at Bug 758878.