I have an old (from 2013) Linux workstation, with Scientific Linux 6.3 installed (actually a dual-boot system with a Windows 7 partition) that has worked for many years. But of course, SL 6 has been EOL'd, and I am now trying to install Fedora 34 Scientific on it. I downloaded the LIVE .iso and burned it to a Memorex DVD-R on a MacBook Pro using the Finder "Burn Disk Image" command. The resulting disk proved unbootable - not too surprising, as I have no idea what the Finder's command does. The disk is not mountable, either, on either the Mac or the Linux box. Again, not too surprising.

So I tried burning a smaller .iso, this time the SL 7.9 LIVE .iso from scientificlinux.org, thinking maybe the image size was the problem. Instead of the Mac, I tried using brasero on the Linux box. But brasero claimed that there were no media in the DVD drive. I then tried burning the SL 7.9 image using the Windows 7 built-in disk burner - this worked, and produced a disk that the Mac was able to mount and read. However, it was still not bootable on the Linux box, in fact when I tried to mount it with the command "mount -t iso9660 /dev/sr0 /mnt/cdrom", I received an error "no medium found on /dev/sr0".

Even trying to burn the image using dd if=SL-79-x86_64-2020-10-17-LiveDVDgnome.iso -of=/dev/sr0" returns "No medium found".

It can't be that the BIOS doesn't support DVD-R, or I wouldn't have been able to burn the disk under Windows. And if the problem were in SL 6.3, perhaps a missing driver, that still wouldn't explain the inability to boot from the DVD.

I'm at my wits' end at this point and am not sure what my options are. I know that GRUB2 can boot from an .iso file on the hard disk, but SL 6 only has GRUB 0.97 and I can find no guidance on installing GRUB2 under RHEL or any RHEL fork prior to 7. Does anyone have ideas on what the problem might be or how I might be able to upgrade my system?

Liz

Welcome to LinuxQestions.

Did you verify the downloaded ISO files matched their check sums?

I would of expected the DVD file created on the Mac to be readable on the Mac if the ISO file was good.

It appears like your DVD on the linux box is bad or maybe dirty.

Have you tried a flash drive?

Thanks, I was ultimately able to install from a flash drive (though I messed up at first, overwrote a system partition, and for reasons too involved to go into, was forced to abandon Fedora for now and go with Scientific Linux 7.9).

The problem seems to be in the BIOS rather than the drive. Under Windows, I was able to burn the ISO to DVD but the system could not read it, either under Windows or Linux (the Mac could read that DVD though). Mount under Linux reports no media in the drive, so my guess is that there is limited support for DVD-R in the BIOS, that Windows knows how to make the supported calls but Linux does not.

In any case, USB worked fine so I'll let this issue go unsolved. USB seems to be a better way to install from large ISOs anyway, due to capacity limitations of standard (single-layer) DVD-R.

Liz