Driver Disk

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Revision as of 05:03, 6 January 2022 by Leo (talk | contribs)
This page was last edited on 6 January 2022, at 05:03.

Red Hat allows for 'driver disks' to be loaded during an install in case there is no out-of-the-box driver support for a specific piece of hardware.

If you have an older server that requires a driver that's been dropped, you can most likely find it from ElRepo. Their DUD repo (Eg. https://elrepo.org/linux/dud/el8/x86_64/) contains various driver disks in an ISO format which you can load with the installer. ISO disk drivers are loaded by passing in a inst.dd=<path-or-url-to-iso> as part of the boot option when starting the installer.

DKMS

You can use dkms mkdriverdisk to build a driver disk.

For example: dkms mkdriverdisk -d redhat -m qla2x00

Manually

## Create a blank, 20MB image
# dd if=/dev/zero of=driverdisk.img bs=1M count=20

## Format the image with ext2
# mkfs -t ext2 -q driverdisk.img
 
## mount it and copy the files over
# mount -o loop driverdisk.img /mnt/driverdisk
 
## copy drivers to /mnt/driverdisk, then run
# umount /mnt/tmp

Once you have the driver disk created, you will need to tell the installer to load it by booting into linux expert or linux dd from the boot loader.

See also