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