Greetings,

Thank you all very much for your help. I wasn't in a position to reply
earlier, but I was watching the updates.

The EDD, I think, was a red herring. Turning it off just meant it locked
the screen without anything being printed at all. I installed to a
different hard drive and got the same results. Even when I disabled the
on board SATA in the BIOS and installed to an external disk, same thing.

I will spare all of the gruesome details of all the many things I tried
that didn't work. Here is what finally did work.

Install 7.2 then update everything but microcode_ctl.

Done. :-)

Such a simple statement for such a CRAZY few days of complex debugging.
The short version.

7.3 is fairly new, but many of the servers I have that are nearly the
exact same hardware config have been running for a while and only
recently updated to 7.3. So why not try 7.2? Works no problem. Well that
is odd. Update to 7.3, same problem.

Huh, none of my other boxes have this problem. I wonder what could be
the difference? Same parts. The only things that are different are minor
revision updates (eg, bios is 2 versions newer ect). Then I noticed that
my old boxes are "Intel Xeon E5-2630v3" and the new boxes are "Intel
Xeon E5-2630v4". Well that shouldn't matter...unless there is something
in the microcode or the linux-firmware...

So I started investigating and narrowed it down to the microcode. I'm
throwing this back up to my vendor to chase down w/ Red Hat as it is
reproducible on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2/7.3 and I gotta get these
things on line (one benefit of paying for support is being able to say
"It's broke! Fix it for me!" :-D ). Besides, looking at the Kernel hex
code tracing things out today has given me a headache. :-D

I will find out next week if there is any strange fall out from this,
but for today they seem to be working just fine. I am hoping they
continue to do so until a patch/kernel update rolls down the line.

Thanks again! I really do appreciate the help. The ideas got me thinking
on the right track and helped eliminate variables.

~Stack~