I’ve been upgrading my home VMware lab to vSphere 5.1 today and ran into an issue that I thought I would share. I had – I run HP xw8600 workstations, and because I’m using SATA disks behind a SAS controller they are being seen as ‘remote’ disks to the ESXi installer. This means that I need another type of disk that will be seen as a ‘local’ disk so ESXi can create a scratch partition. A USB thumb drive was the answer, but not without issues.When I installed ESXi 5.0 on the thumb drive, the install completed without problem, but after the post-install reboot ESXi 5 failed to boot.
I received a non-system disk / no bootable device error.When I installed ESXi 5.1 on the same thumb drive, the install completed without problem, and again, after the post-install reboot ESXi failed to load. On ESXi 5.1, however, I didn’t receive an error, but just had a blinking cursor in the upper left corner of an otherwise blank screen.
The cursor just blinked endlessly – no ESXi loaded.The fix was the same for both 5.0 and 5.1, even though the symptoms were different. Because I’m running on vintage hardware, my BIOS does not support booting from GUID Partition Table (GPT) partitions. As of vSphere 5.0, of the system disk from Master Boot Record (MBR) to GPT. My motherboard does not have a UEFI option, so booting from GPT isn’t going to work. A GPT is not necessary on a 4GB thumb drive , so the fix was to simply format my system disk as MBR. There is an install option in the ESXi installation routine to force the system disk to be formatted with MBR instead of GPT, enabling ESXi to boot correctly. Here’s how to enable ESXi to format the installation disk with MBR:1.) Boot server from ESXi installation media.2.) Wait for prompt in lower left-hand corner that says.
Here are the steps to create a bootable ESXi 5 USB stick: Linux, Windows, MAC OS X, etc) 02. Format the USB stick with FAT32 and make sure it takes a drive letter (E: for example) 03. Use Unetbootin to select your VMware ESXi 5 iso file – VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.0.0.update01-623860.x8664.iso and with the dropdown arrow choose the correct USB drive from your system.
![Boot Esxi From Usb Boot Esxi From Usb](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125662977/841871244.png)
Press SHIFT+O (that’s the letter O, not a zero).3.) In the lower-left hand corner, after the word ‘runweasel’ insert a space then type formatwithmbr. Press enter to continue the installation process.ESXi should now install as normal. After the install, you should find that your server (workstation) boots into ESXi. If it doesn’t, you may have to play with BIOS options a bit more.
I’ve heard of AHCI mode causing issues with boot from USB, as well as incorrect boot order, and simply enabling the boot from USB option in BIOS. Aso, check to see if your server/workstation can support an EFI image instead of traditional BIOS.If you are interested in some other ESXi boot options, see here:.When using the formatwithmbr option, the VMFS paritition created on the boot disk will be formatted as MBR. Any other VMFS partitions that are created on other disks in your system will be formatted with GPT per the. Thnxs you are the Best!!!I instaled esxi 5.1 on: Hp Dl320g4, Hp ML 110 G5, Hp ML150 G3, Hp ML110 G6, Hp ML110 G7 IBM x3200 M1 & M2, IBM x3250 M1 & M2 and now I tried to install on Hp DL120 G7 and not boot after instalation. Never have to make nothing I install on SanDisk Cruzer Fit 4Gb USB Thumb (very litlle and have Light Read/Write.cool) the Hp ISO or IBM ISO.I dont understand why. A Hp Dl120 G7 dont boot but your save me!!! Your site its the best.
Thanx a lot and sorry for my bad english from Buenos Aires – Argentina.
![Boot Boot](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125662977/458687874.png)
There was an interesting discussion on our internal Socialcast platform last week on figuring out how an ESXi host is booted up whether it is from local device like a disk or USB device, Auto Deploy or even boot from SAN along with its respective boot device? Although I had answered the question, I was not confident that we actually had a reliable and programmatic method for identifying all the different ESXi boot methods, which of course piqued my interest.With a bit of trial and error in the lab, I believe I have found a method in which we can identify the ESXi boot type (Local, Stateless, Stateless Caching, Stateful or Boot from SAN) along with some additional details pertaining to the boot device. To demonstrate this, I have created the following PowerCLI script which contains a function called Get-ESXiBootDevice.The function can be called without any parameters, in which it will query all ESXi hosts for a given vCenter Server and/or standalone ESXi host.
You can also specify a specific ESXi host by simply passing in the -VMHostname option.Here is an example output for one of my lab environments which shows several ESXi hosts and their different boot methods from local disk to Auto Deploy which can include stateless, stateless caching and stateful deployments. Depending on the BootType, the boot device shown in the Device column will either be the MAC Address of the NIC used to network boot the ESXi host or the identifier of a disk device. I have also included some additional details such as vendor/model along with the media type (SAS, SSD or USB) which is available as part of ESXCLI.This script also supports ESXi environments that boot from SAN (FC, FCoE or iSCSI) and you can easily identify that with the word 'remote' for the BootType.
I would like to give a huge thanks to who helped me out with the boot from SAN testing. BTW, changing get-esxcli from -V2 to V1 (by removing the -V2 from the script), provides a completely different output on some hosts.