[gentoo-user] Booting minimal installer ISO on rx4640 and rx2660 fails

[Frank Scheiner]

Hi,

I'm trying to boot my Itanium gear with the current minimal installer 
ISO [1] on CDROM but so far had no success at all. I also tested the 
oldest of the minimal installer ISOs [2] still available, also without 
success. For both my rx4640 and rx2660 I get the following output when 
trying to boot from the internal DVD (its access LED lights up shortly):

```
Loading.: Internal Bootable DVD
Load of Internal Bootable DVD failed: Not Found
Press any key to continue
```

I've burned these ISOs with Brasero 3.10.0 on Ubuntu 14.04 and I can 
access the contents of the CDROMs there too. I could even extract the 
included kernel and initrd (and include the squashfs image) - following 
and slightly adapting the howto on [3] for Itanium - and boot them, but 
sadly couldn't get to the point where I could start the installation 
process. I either did something wrong during the extraction and creation 
process of initrd and initrd plus squashfs image, or the howto does not 
work as intended for Itanium machines.

The machines seem to work correctly using a Debian Wheezy based NFS root 
and were also able to boot the Debian 7.11 installer ISO on DVD for 
Itanium without an issue though, hence I don't think this is a problem 
of the machines or their DVD drives.

Does anybody have an idea, what could be wrong? And can somebody confirm 
that these ISOs - when burned to CDROMs - work on rx4640 or rx2660 or 
similar machines?

Cheers,
Frank

[1]: 
http://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/ia64/autobuilds/20170810/install-ia64-minimal-20170810.iso

[2]: 
http://distfiles.gentoo.org/releases/ia64/autobuilds/20170627/install-ia64-minimal-20170627.iso

[3]: 
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Installation_alternatives#Diskless_install_using_PXE_and_kernel.2Finitrd.2Fsquashfs_from_the_LiveCD