Fedora 42 Kickstart installation stuck at "Checking storage configuration" with sda1 not bootable warning

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1

After a long unsuccessful troubleshooting effort I’m asking for help here.
We have 80 Dell workstations on which we install the latest Fedora release via Kickstart.
The same Kickstart file is used that we used for the Fedora 40 installation with changed repo URLs, and this file worked a few months ago to install Fedora 42 on a subset of the workstations.

We now wanted to reinstall all workstations to Fedora 42, but the installation gets stuck at

Starting installer, one moment...
anaconda 42.27.12-1.fc42 for Fedora 42 started.
 * installation log files are stored in /tmp during the installation
 * shell is available on TTY2 and in second TMUX pane (ctrl+b, then press 2)
 * if the graphical installation interface fails to start, try again with the
   inst.text boot option to start text installation
 * when reporting a bug add logs from /tmp as separate text/plain attachments
14:39:16 Not asking for remote desktop session because of an automated install
14:39:16 Not asking for remote desktop session because text mode was explicitly asked for in kickstart
Starting automated install.Saving storage configuration...
.Checking storage configuration...
...................................................................................

In the Anaconda Kickstart storage.log there is:

WARNING:anaconda.modules.storage.bootloader.base:sda1 not bootable

The section responsible for creating the partitions looks like this:

lang en_US.UTF-8
keyboard de-latin1-nodeadkeys
network    --bootproto=dhcp --noipv6
timezone   --utc Europe/Berlin
rootpw     --iscrypted PASSWORD
firewall   --disabled
firstboot  --disabled
text
clearpart --all --drives=sd*|hd*|nvme*|vda --initlabel
sshpw --username=root PASSWORD --iscrypted

# EFI-Boot:
part /boot --fstype=ext4 --size=1024
part /boot/efi --fstype=efi --size=1024

# Common:
part /     --fstype=ext4 --grow --maxsize=51200 --size=40960
part /var  --fstype=ext4 --size=16384
part swap  --grow --maxsize=8192 --size=1024
part /scratch --fstype=ext4 --grow

bootloader --location=mbr --timeout=5 --password PASSWORD --iscrypted
reboot

Could someone help us with this problem?

2

Which boot mode are you intending to install with?

It appears that this
part /boot/efi --fstype=efi --size=1024
and this
bootloader --location=mbr --timeout=5 --password PASSWORD --iscrypted
conflict.

You also probably will not need this part swap --grow --maxsize=8192 --size=1024 since fedora by default uses ZRAM for swap as default (contained in RAM)

3

This kickstart is for UEFI for DELL OptiPlex 5060/Micro Plus 7010/7020.

5

For uefi booting I am surprised you make the /boot efi even though the root file system is ext4. What I would expect would be that the efi partition would be /boot/efi and that /boot would reside within the root partition file system.

7

Thank you very much for the helpful tips.

It turned out that the Fedora mirror and the Tier 1 mirror we use got bricked during synchronization.

The Kickstart installation failed not because of partitioning, but because the mirrors it was supposed to use were malformed.