"J" == Jarett DeAngelis jarett@bioteam.net writes:
Hi Jarett,
welcome back. I kind of hoped that this strange problem would dissolve by itself, but it seems to be stubborn :)
J> Hi all (especially Roland who has been so helpful), I’ve resumed J> trying to troubleshoot this. Are we absolutely, positively sure J> the ISO on the website is set up correctly?
Yes. It must be a special issue of your hardware. Too many successful installs, and so far, your case is the only one I'm aware of with this kind of problem.
J> Since this last email I have tried dd imaging it (after checking J> sha256sum) into several devices and booting on several J> machines. It won’t boot via legacy/BIOS on any of these machines.
That's really weird. What type of machines were they? Do you have any Supermicro server by any chance where you can try it? That's the most common platform Qlustar is used on.
J> If I use the “alternative” method available from the Windows J> “Rufus” utility, it can get part of the way through booting J> before complaining of a missing EXFAT kernel module.
I can't comment about Rufus.
J> I have also tried burning the image to CD-R. When I booted from J> it I saw a number of errors related to bad sectors on the CD, but J> it eventually continued through the installation. After it was J> finished, rebooting to the installed hard drive didn’t work; it J> says it isn’t bootable, although the expected partition map seems J> to be there.
I don't know what harm the bad sectors could have done, but if the installation went through and the BIOS is setup correctly for legacy, it should probably boot. Burning another DVD might be safer though. Have you checked whether your machines have the latest BIOS? There might be a flaw in their legacy boot mode ...
J> I’m going to try to burn it again in case I had a bad CD-R. I’ve J> tried to do it via my Mac, though, and it says the ISO image is J> invalid. This raises a red flag for me. Are there alternate J> installation methods I can try?
On some servers, there is the possibility to boot a remote ISO via IPMI, don't know whether you're machine supports that.
One other thing you could try is to install Ubuntu on your headnode and then Qlustar within a VM through kvm on top of it. While you will loose some performance (not too much these days), for evaluation purposes this might be sufficient.
Best,
Roland