[CentOS] Installing 32-bit CentOS 6 on a new Lenovo System x3650 M5 server?

[Alfred von Campe]

> On May 13, 2016, at 16:27, I wrote:
> 
> Is there any known incompatibility with the latest 32-bit (i386) CentOS 6 and the latest Lenovo x3650 M5 servers?  I’ve been running i386 CentOS 6.X on 3 year old x3650 M4 servers without any issues.  Our development environment has not been ported to 64-bit (x86_64) yet, so we are stuck using i386 for another few months.  When I try to boot from the netinstall ISO image I just get a “Boot Failed” message. Has anyone had similar issues, and more importantly, figured out a way to workaround it?

I’ll answer my own question now that I’ve figured it out in case anyone else is in the same boat.  After the i386 CentOS 6 net install ISO failed to boot, I tried the LiveCD and minimal ISOs which failed in the same way.  Then I tried various x86_64 ISO images to no avail.  The only ISO image that I was able to boot from was the latest Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release.  But I really need i386 CentOS.  I was able to install it by clicking on a Legacy checkbox in the BIOS, which brought up a different list of boot devices and I was finally successful in booting from the ISO image.  I then had to finagle the BIOS to always boot in legacy mode so that it would recognize the i386 CentOS boot partition on each powerup.

Alfred