Thanks for posting your experience.

For others trying this there's a good script here for this - viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4.

I acknowledge functioning of this driver set on Asus M3a78-emh (ati sb700). 1002:4391 (ahci mode) works even though 1002:439c does not. It makes ide channel inoperable. What makes it worse is that out of 6 sata banks in ahci mode work only 4. The other 2 also cannot be seen in esxi. Onboard NIC is r8168, which works fine.

I also can confirm a working installation on GA-MA78GM-US2H using Jen's modified oem.tgz. Thank you very much! I have been trying off and on over a period of several months to get this system to work. Anyway, here was my method:

1. Set SATA mode to AHCI.
2. Use UltraISO (Windows trial version) to edit the U2 install iso and replace the current oem.tgz with the modified one.
3. Burn the iso, to cd, boot, and install.
4. Boot from a Fedora Live CD, and replace the oem.tgz on the hypervisor1 partitition with the modified one. This is by far the easiest way in my opinion. I tried to modify it on the intall.tgz on the original install cd, but ended up just wasting a lot of time.
5. Boot from the hard disk then use the vmi infrastructure update to update the ESXi server to the latest version. Works like a charm.

Okay, for those of us that are completely new to ESXi (Me) I pulled my hair out last night and some this morning trying to get this going before I found this post.

This is what I'm learning about this board (GA-MA78GM-US2H)

1) Booting from USB to ESXi doesn't work. You get some message such as "Panic: Cannot get disk parameters."

2) Update the bios to F3 proved to be more of a pain that I remember if you don't have access to floppy disk drives or bootable CD images. I was unable boot to USB to flash this bios. I ended up needing to make a bootable CD with the bios updates

3) AHCI needs to be enabled

4) Injecting the oem.tgz file to the ISO is a pain from windows. WinISO in trial mode won't save the ISO because it's over 100megs.

5) Step 4 of Having the oem.tgz file on the CD isn't enough. It will let you install at this point, but after that ESXi will boot and then panic and won't work

This is as far as I got so far. So step 6 is actually a question to make sure I'm understanding correctly.

6) oem.tgz needs to be updated on the drive which can be done from
a)arp's instructions using a livecd
or
b) oem.tgz could be injected into the VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_4-153875.i386.dd file which is several layers deep on the CD following the instructions for putting the oem.tgz file on a usb key and then injecting that .dd file back into the ISO, burn the CD, then reinstall ESXi?

So is step 6b a reasonable option?

step 6b is possible. If you look in the Tips and Tricks forum there's a script there that will do this viewforum.php?f=7

or a direct method - http://www.grid.org/blog/cameron/updati ... -dump-file

Thank you, you will probably save the last of my hair that I seem to be pulling out a lot of lately.

This forum has helped a lot!

Yes, I can confirm that there are issues with this driver. I have r8168 card on my mobo and was able to install esxi u4 on this machine. I was able to copy VM from old esxi server to this one. However under Solaris 10 VM i have issues - non-working vncserver (connection reset by peer) and reset connection while i'm transferring files by SCP to this VM. So I think that smth. going wrong with traffic to the VM because copying from old esxi to new one esxi completed w/o any issues with great speed. Also i have no any issues with this VM on my old esxi.

I've got the same issue with a GA-P35-DS3L, a P35/ICH9-based Gigabyte board. Unfortunately this seems to be a common issue with Gigabyte motherboards. I thought it was only Intel-based boards, but it looks like it's AMD-based boards, too.

Really sucks...I was hoping that the only spinning disks I'd need would be entirely for storage.

Hello John, do you have an option to set the USB device to emulate a fixed hard drive?

Unfortunately, no. I've updated to the latest BIOS, and it just doesn't see a USB key as a boot device. I know the key works - I slapped it into my regular workstation and it booted into ESXi with no tweaking at all! Goggling the intertubes shows a lot of the same issues with intel-based Gigabyte boards, but this is the first mention of an AMD-based board with the same issue.