Hey all,
So I managed to acquire ESXi 5.0 and installed onto a bootable USB Stick to boot off my Zotac GF9300-G-E Mini ITX. It seems that the iSCSI mounting works, ethernet card works and lspci does see the nvidia sata mass controller but I aint able to mount any SATA hard drive locally. The BIOS is currently set as AHCI mode. Any ideas on how to get it to work?

After some investigation I found that in a file (/etc/vmware/driver.map.d/sata_nv.map) displays some nvidia drivers. If I added the MCP7A one into it nothing happens and upon rebooting the machine that line is removed...


I am hoping someone has a solution...

Hate to revive an old-ish thread. Have you found a solution for the MCP7A sata controller with ESXi 5?

Nope I havent yet. I have seen on the forums that the source code was released so as soon as some people get it working I would like to try it on this mobo.

I also just wanted to voice my interest in this issue being solved. I have a Zotac IONITX-G-E board. The difference being the Atom 330 vs the intel socket. However the same sata controller is used. From what I can tell everything else loaded up correctly. The last hurdle is the sata controller.

I saw in another post in the ESIX 4.x branch that a group put some extensive effort into this only to run out steam or hit a dead end.

I am new to ESXI, but would be willing to test or guinea pig anything I could.

However I recognize this motherboard is getting long in the tooth and it would probably be easier to just replace it with something that is compatible.

I just wanted to say I have had success installing ESXI 5.0 on my Zotac IonITX-g-e system. The storage controller MCP7A is very similar to MCP79 and I found a very nice write up at

http://www.twinsquared.ch/bcyrill/blog/article/17#post

Includes the oem.tgz file and directions to get you up and running. It worked for me. So I would think it stands a good chance for working with the Zotac 9300-G-E board. Even the NIC recognized. The only weird thing was modifying the boot.cfg file to change the order in which modules loaded. Other than that straight forward. Installing Ubuntu now, and working on Ipcop and freenas next