I have a machine that I am trying to install the VMWare ESXi 5.1 on to test and learn. (dual core, 8 Gb RAM) I did originally have issues with the onboard NIC and the fact that it was not compatible with ESXi, so I have installed an Intel card and have been able to get to the install point. The machine originally had a Western Digital (blue) SATA hard drive. The install would run, and upon reboot I would get:
BANK5: not a VMware boot bank
BANK6: not a VMware boot bank
No hypervisor found.
I ended up trying a different hard drive (a Hitachi 130Gb SATA) and left the 300 Gb disk disconnected. The install seemed to run successfully. I then shut things down and then reconnected the 300 Gb disk and rebooted. The machine rebooted and I could see the disk from within the configuration settings. I set up a virtual machine from an ovf file (Novell iPrint appliance) and everything was good. I then decided to set up the 2nd drive as an additional data store. Once set up all was good till I rebooted the machine. When the machine was rebooted I got the same message as above.
Thinking that there was something with the Western Digital drive, I went and purchased a Seagate 1Tb SATA disk and proceeded to run the install on it. I get the same error message as above about the hypervisor not found.
I tried setting up the 130Gb disk to be the first disk and the 1Tb disk to be an additional disk and I get the same thing. I was able once to get the 130 disk set up and running, then added the 1Tb disk to the system. Once added I created a datastore of about 100Gb on the 1Tb disk and rebooted. The machine rebooted successfully. I then expanded the datastore by 300Gb and rebooted. The machine then gave the same error as above.
I have tried many combinations of trying to get the 300Gb or 1Tb disk to be a datastore, and nothing seems to work. I have also been deleting the partitions of the disks and reformating them with ext3 SLES 11 before running the ESXi install. Nothing seems to work.
Anybody have any recommendations to get this to work?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions anybody can provide.