Frustration of the week..

Given two live-cd linux distros, both based on ADIOS, why is it that one of them installs into vmware painlessly, and the other simply refuses to stand up and be recognized?

We have two live-cd distros, both courtesy of the Cisco Network Academy folks. There are both based on ADIOS, but the individual distro's were developed by two different groups within the Academy.

The first distro is called Eagle, and it acts as expected. It boots from cd, and boots up into a usable state as required by the needs of the labs.

Eagle has an option to install to disk, which works as expected.

The second distro is called Discovery, and it does not act as expected. It boots from cd, but stops at the boot menu, requiring user intervention to boot into the correct configuration. Once it boots, sysadmin action is required to reconfigure it to a usable state, as required by the needs of the labs.

Discovery also has an option to install to disk, however, it doesn't work. It doesn't boot, and the BIOS tells me "no operating system found".

Just for kicks and giggles, I tried installing the base ADIOS distribution into VMware, and it failed in an identical manner.

If this was a single physical server, sitting in the lab, I would simply put it on a spare PC, plugged into a UPS, and configure it, and forget it. But, this is one of two Discovery servers that have to be integrated into Netlab, as individual VM's that are started and stopped by Netlab. Thus, it has to boot into a usable state, without user intervention.