Burn the ISO to a CD-R and boot from a physical optical drive. This is rarely practical for modern servers but confirms the issue is indeed the absence of a CD-ROM.
MikroTik’s installation ISO is designed to be bootable from multiple media: CD/DVD, USB flash drives, or network (PXE). During the early boot phase, the installer probes for available storage devices that can provide the necessary installation files. The “fatal error no cd rom found” appears when the installer expects to find a CD-ROM drive containing the installation media but cannot detect any—even if the user booted from a USB drive. fatal error no cd rom found mikrotik full
This occurs because the MikroTik installer (based on a minimal Linux environment) sometimes misidentifies the boot device or fails to properly mount the installation source. Instead of a generic “installation source not found” message, the legacy code reports the absence of a CD-ROM. Burn the ISO to a CD-R and boot
Why this works: It emulates the old IDE controller the MikroTik kernel expects. During the early boot phase, the installer probes