Hello:

I'm planning to update from U3 to U4 and I was wondering if the mods I've made to the system will be maintained. Instead of modifying the oem.tgz I created new tgz files in that same directory called mymods an mymods2 (got that idea elsewhere on web). To make ESXi load those you have to change the boot.cfg file (which is easy). Do you suppose this will survive the update?

I may be able to answer this question experimentally pretty soon though!

Thanks.

Hmm. Didn't go TOO well, but just need (maybe) this one thing answered to fix it:

It tried to boot but failed because it was using the modified boot.cfg file which called my 'MYMODS.TGZ' files, but it did not have those files in the altbootbank directory. I rebooted it and it was then back to the old version. I copied my files to the altbootbank directory as required but now I can't figure out how to tell ESXi to attempt to boot the updated version which is now on altbootbank again.

Anyone know how to make it do that?

Thanks.

OK... the way to make it reboot off the altbootbank is to press shift R at the start of the boot.

I did that but it told me that boot partition (not exactly that) was corrupt or invalid so it could only boot from the main one.

So now the question becomes what do I have to do to tell it to re-evaluate the altbootbank...

I'm guessing something to do with the "updated=x" and "bootstate=x" in boot.cfg on altbootbank.

Does anyone know what the values of those variables tell the machine?

Thanks.

So, I rm -rf the altbootbank directory and reinstalled the update. This time, before rebooting I copied my custom mymods.tgz files into the altbootbank directory. This time the update took hold and worked fine.

For the record, the boot.cfg file between the time up the update and the reboot had "updated=2" and "bootstate=1".

Looks like you had some fun with this. Just for others who might read this thread
1) renaming any custom tgz file to be oem.tgz (you might download a different file name like ICH10_oem.tgz) will get around this issue.
2) if you are using a different name for the tgz file, then you should modify boot.cfg in /altbootbank to include your custom tgz file before you apply the patch.

As an aside, you can use more than one custom tgz file - you just add all your files to the modules line in boot.cfg in both /bootbank and /altbootbank.

Yes... well, I suppose it was fun.

The one thing I was not sure about was whether the oem.tgz file had anything in it originally. That's why I was a bit reluctant to touch it, but on my system it was blank. I have since rolled my two 'custom' .tgz files into the oem and just did it that way (following your excellent instructions at http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/customize_oem_tgz.php.

Thanks.

By default it will exist with a size of 137 bytes and just have a text file in it with the word generic.