Hi

I have an intention to install ESXi 4.1 on one of our new servers. Unfortunatly the hardware support is not out of the box and after a while searching I ended up on vm-help.com.

When trying to install with the normal ISO from VMware the installation just crashes after accepting the licence condition with an vmkctl.HostCtlException due to a vmfs3 module.

After some reading i do believe that the issue might be a driver problem with the network interface, which is an Marvell Yukon 88E8056 Gigabit Ethernet controller.

While browsing this forum I found a thread where the same hardware is used and it appear to me that the person in question was able to make this work.
Since this person is using the same motherboard model as I do I wanted to give this a shot.

I follow the HowTo, that I found on this forum, for creating a USB installation. The setup worked with out much trouble but when I boot from the USB device it prompts me to enter kernel boot options.

When I just press enter the system writes back to the console "Could not find kernel image: Linux"

I then tried to enter the boot options that apear when I boot up from the original ISO file and appended at the end "--- oem.tgz"
Now the system tells me that mboot.c32 was not found.

I read in a differend post that this might be caused due to an corrupted ISO. However I ran the md5 check sum and they match.

I kinda get tempted to believe that somehow the USB device is not fully mounted and there for it can't find the files but if that is the case I do not understand how I at all can boot up from the device.

Can anyone tell me what might be the issue here?

When you created the USB image, was it the Boot from USB option or Install from USB? I.e. with the install from USB option, you'll still require a local HD to install ESXi onto. With the boot option, ESXi will run from the USB device.

What's the name of the ISO you used ?

Thanks alot for the quick reply.

My intention was to make a install to a local drive so I picked the USB install option from the script.

The ISO I used for the USB install is called VMware-VMvisor-Installer-4.1.0-260247.x86_64.iso. I burned this image the first time to a CD. From this image I can boot but as meantioned before it crashes after the licence agreement.

I took from this thread the oem mod, the second attachment, called mymod-network.new2.tgz.

The reason why I went for this one is that it was meantioned in the first thread that discussed my motherboard model.

I can not say for sure if this actually is the very same that is meantioned in it, afterall it is just a name, but from the description it seems to fit my hardware.

From what I read it is specially the sky2.o file that might be compatable with the Marvell NIC that I need.

I just wanted to let you know that I have found a workaround for this issue.

I simply picked the first option in the script, that will burn the customized image to a CD instead.

By doing this the system started up as intended and I was able to install ESXi.

So for now I think my issue resolved. Thanks alot for your time