I’ve been recently doing some scripting work with the Ultimate Deployment Appliance (UDA) which was developed by Carl Thijsen of the Netherlands. The reason for this work is to make it easy for me to switch between different versions of EVO:RAIL using my SuperMicro systems. I want to be able to easily flip between different builds, and its seemed like the easiest way to do this remotely was using my old faithful the UDA. This means I can run EVO:RAIL 1.2.1 which based on vSphere5.5, and then rebuild the physical systems around our newer builds, which incidentally use vSphere6.0.
Anyway, I encountered an odd error when scripting the install of VMware ESXi 5.5. One hadn’t seen with VMware ESXi 6.0. The error looked like said :Error: Error: Read-only file system during write on /dev/disks/naa.blah.blah.blah.
Normally, the lines:
clearpart –alldrives –overwritevmfs
install –firstdisk=ST300MM0026,local –overwritevmfs
Would be enough to wipe any existing installation and VMFS volume. But the installer wasn’t happy. Incidentally “ST300MM0026” is the boot disk, a Seagate drive. However, that didn’t seem to work. I had to modify the ‘clearpart’ line like so:
clearpart –firstdisk=ST300MM0026 –overwritevmfs
install –firstdisk=ST300MM0026,local –overwritevmfs
I think what was happening was that clearpart wasn’t seeing the drive properly, and specifing it by model number allowed the VMFS partition to properly cleared.
Anyway, I doubt this will matter to most people, but I thought I would share in case someone else sees this…
UPDATE: Well, after automating the install of VMware ESXi 5.5, decided to flip back to VMware ESXi 6.0. I encountered the exact same error. So now both my 5.5 and 6.0 scripts include the change to clearpart.