Can't boot successfully custom RHEL 7.4 ISO off of SSD Drive

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I've been working on this issue now for some time.

I've used the following as references and help

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/60959

https://access.redhat.com/discussions/1422213

We have servers that don't have CDROMs, only hard drive sleds and we're trying to install a custom RHEL 7.4 ISO that lives on a 1.9 TB Micron SSD.

I know the ISO is good as I can run KVM, set up a CentOS 7 VM to boot off of the ISO, which it does successfully.

So I do the following from a RHEL7 workstation, mount the ISO, dump the contents to a directory and modify isolinux.cfg with the following

append initrd=initrd.img inst.stage2=hd:LABEL=MATCHING_ISO_NAME_HERE inst.ks=cdrom:/ks.cfg ramdisk_size=8192 modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nomodeset rd.live.ram

Run the following command with no issues

mkisfofs -o /tmp/MATCHING_ISO_NAME_HERE.iso -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -J -R -l -c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table \
-eltorito-alt-boot -e images/efiboot.img no-emul-boot -graft-points -V "MATCHING_ISO_NAME_HERE" .

Since all of our servers are using Legacy BIOS, I run the following command:

isohybrid --partok ISO_NAME_HERE.iso

Use DD command to move the ISO to /dev/sdb (which is the SSD on the hard drive sled)

dd if=ISO_NAME_HERE.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=2048 status=progress

I've used the following commands to validate the work. lsblk only shows one partition /dev/sdb1.

I run file against the ISO and it shows bootable.

I run isoinfo -l -i against the ISO and it shows the various directory structure along with the files in them.

I power off the server and only have the SSD in and boot up and its able to boot up, however it locks up on this part:

[    15.034666] loop: module loaded
[    69.692875] random: crng init done

I've tried giving it 20 minutes to see if it will continue to boot and it doesn't. I've also tried to press the space bar and various keys to see if that will help move the boot process along and it doesn't.

I'm at a loss on how to troubleshoot or fix. Googling around shows this is tied to the kernel random number generator.

thanks

CM

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