@paul: Thanks for digging that out. Interestingly, it proved unnecessary - I powered the system back up with the boot USB plugged in, waited the several minutes this system needs to run all its BIOS stuff, then hit <f11> at the SuperMicro boot screen. Now for the new part - the first time I did the above, the boot menu listed 3 items correspondng to the boot USB: 'boot general' and under that 'boot partition 1' and 'boot partition 2'. I recalled that after creating the boot USB, dd copied the iso-image to partition 1, but on try #1 I just hit 'boot general'. This time I selected 'boot partition 1' and everything worked, root/user-info all entered and it's copying files and configuring the kernel as I write this. Fingers crossed, time to get dinner and go offline for the evening. Update tomorrow.
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