CentOS - Dec 2015 - Supermicro CentOS 7 install failure

My workhorse server is a SuperMicro with their H8DM8-2 motherboard. For
many years it ran CentOS 5.x and 6.x until the boot drive failed last
year. I installed a 1TB SSD as /dev/sda and planned to install CentOS 7 on
it, replacing CentOS 6.5 on the failed drive. Unfortunately every CentOS 7
media I tried, either optical disk or USB thumb drive, breaks down just a
few seconds after selecting "Install..."

The H8DM8-2 motherboard is based on the nVidia MPC55 Pro and NEC uPD720400
chipsets. It has an on-board Adaptec AIC-7902W dual-channel SCSI
controller and companion Zero-Channel RAID card. It has twin AMD Opteron
HE processors and 32GB of registered ECC DDR2 memory. The RAID array is
populated with ten Fujitsu 300GB 15K SCSI3 drives.

I took it into a friendly Linux shop where they reviewed / verified all of
my work and confirmed the boot-time problem. Two hours into the effort, my
friend plugged in a bootable Windows 10 thumb drive and to our amazement,
it came up very normally. So did another thumb drive with a Fedora 23
installation image. So there's nothing wrong with my hardware.

We believe the problem is due to Red Hat compiling RHEL7 without at least
one old device driver that I still need. My friend thinks we should build
an installation disk from a modified CentOS 7 live CD kickstart file and a
CentOS-Plus kernel. While that may work, I think there may be a simpler
boot-time kernel option I could use to successfully install from a stock
ISO.

Does anyone have any suggestions for boot-time options I could try?

--Doc Savage
  Fairview Heights, IL

On 20/12/15 11:13 PM, dsavage at peaknet.net wrote:
> My workhorse server is a SuperMicro with their H8DM8-2 motherboard. For
> many years it ran CentOS 5.x and 6.x until the boot drive failed last
> year. I installed a 1TB SSD as /dev/sda and planned to install CentOS 7 on
> it, replacing CentOS 6.5 on the failed drive. Unfortunately every CentOS 7
> media I tried, either optical disk or USB thumb drive, breaks down just a
> few seconds after selecting "Install..."
> 
> The H8DM8-2 motherboard is based on the nVidia MPC55 Pro and NEC uPD720400
> chipsets. It has an on-board Adaptec AIC-7902W dual-channel SCSI
> controller and companion Zero-Channel RAID card. It has twin AMD Opteron
> HE processors and 32GB of registered ECC DDR2 memory. The RAID array is
> populated with ten Fujitsu 300GB 15K SCSI3 drives.
> 
> I took it into a friendly Linux shop where they reviewed / verified all of
> my work and confirmed the boot-time problem. Two hours into the effort, my
> friend plugged in a bootable Windows 10 thumb drive and to our amazement,
> it came up very normally. So did another thumb drive with a Fedora 23
> installation image. So there's nothing wrong with my hardware.
> 
> We believe the problem is due to Red Hat compiling RHEL7 without at least
> one old device driver that I still need. My friend thinks we should build
> an installation disk from a modified CentOS 7 live CD kickstart file and a
> CentOS-Plus kernel. While that may work, I think there may be a simpler
> boot-time kernel option I could use to successfully install from a stock
> ISO.
> 
> Does anyone have any suggestions for boot-time options I could try?
Try 'nomodeset'. It might not be detecting the video card properly.

-- 
Digimer
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