"J" == Jarett DeAngelis jarett@bioteam.net writes:
J> At the end of my rope, I finally tried booting from a CD-R. The J> first time I tried burning it, the disc was rife with errors and J> the system wouldn’t boot properly after installation. The second J> time seemed to work and I was able to complete head node J> installation,
That's already good news.
J> but I couldn’t get compute nodes to bootstrap correctly. I may J> try this again tonight, because I found a way to boot from USB:
J> I beat my head against the problem some more and was finally able J> to get all the way through the installation process by using the J> YUMI utility ( J> https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/ ) and J> telling it to place the boot image in “partition 4” on the USB as J> listed in the imaging options. Why this is a thing that matters, J> I have no idea. Maybe someone else has a clue as to why starting J> the installer from inside the YUMI boot environment and choosing J> this extra partition option seems to work where no other option J> does.
J> So, Jeremy, I think our problems are related, but not J> identical. I would be willing to bet, though, that something J> about what HP does with desktop (or workstation) BIOSes causes J> this problem. I’ve scoured the internet for search terms like “HP J> cannot boot Linux” but while a number of people seem to have this J> issue or something related to it, no one seems to have solutions. J> https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Boot-and-Lockup/Cannot-boot-from-usb-...
It seems rather clear to me now that 'UEFI Compatibility Mode' booting from USB or hard disk is really broken on these HP machines and apparently also on others. As to YUMI: I assume YUMI is doing some kind of chain loading, so that the sticks support UEFI booting but are also capable of starting non UEFI OS media in a second stage.
Full UEFI support for Qlustar (installer and netboot) is in the pipeline for 2020 and this should solve all these and related issues.
Best,
Roland