Red Hat 6 p7 install fails: unable to mount root fs

Problem(Abstract)

During an install of RHEL 6.1 ppc64 onto a Power 7 system, the system experiences the following when booting from the DVD installation media. Note that this may occur on any P7 hardware.

Initalizing network drop monitor service
md: Waiting for all devices to be available before autodetect
md: If you don't use raid, use raid=noautodetect
md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
md: Scanned 0 and added 0 devices.
md: autorun ...
md: ... autorun DONE.
RAMDISK: gzip image found at block 0
RAMDISK: incomplete write (4318 != 32768)
write error
List of all partitions:
No filesystem could mount root, tried: iso9660
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on
unknown-block(1,0)
Call Trace:
[c000001ecbe3fc30] [c000000000012eb4] .show_stack+0x74/0x1c0
(unreliable)
[c000001ecbe3fce0] [c0000000005a640c] .panic+0x80/0x1b4
[c000001ecbe3fd70] [c00000000082152c] .mount_block_root+0x2e8/0x324
[c000001ecbe3fe50] [c0000000008217b4] .prepare_namespace+0x1c4/0x218
[c000001ecbe3fee0] [c000000000820574] .kernel_init+0x348/0x374
[c000001ecbe3ff90] [c0000000000323f4] .kernel_thread+0x54/0x70
Rebooting in 180 seconds..

This issue has also been reported installing RHEL 6 onto a p7 system.

Resolving the problem

To resolve this issue:

1) When your system comes up to SMS, type 8 to get to the firmware prompt.
2) Enter the following two commands:
dev nvram
wipe-nvram
3) Reboot and boot from DVD.