i want to recover a headless colo box.  i can go to iphouse and plug in a
monitor.  or ask them to.  but i'd rather do something that's less of a
time drain.

i can view its normal reboot process via serial port, but now it's stuck at
"Give root password for maintenance" and said password isn't accepted.

this happened because i installed an updated mdadm from source.  which i'm
guessing wasn't configured correctly for rhel6.

i did that because mdadm (fully updated via centos) kept pinning the CPU.
some curious bug dependent on firing up sufficient userspace activity.
i've now also seen the same bug on another centos6 box.

anyway i want to install centos7 in an available partition, both to
retrieve data from the borked OS, and because i want to install centos7
anyway.

booting a centos7 cd displays a blank white screen via serial.  perhaps the
centos7 cd doesn't handle booting a serial console?  or perhaps it does
with some special interaction?  anyone know?

if it requires remastering a cd, perhaps someone could point me to the best
relevant howto (none of us enjoy wasting time on the ubiquitous
outdated/inapplicable/incorrect howtos)

or perhaps it would be less of a waste of time to install some other
distribution whose install cd just works via serial.  does ubuntu?  or
something else?
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