I have reached a stuck process on ESXi 3.5 on my HP Proliant DL140 G1 (Yeah its old.)

So far, it's running via IDE - along with CD Drive - I have the orginal broadcom network adapters which came with the machine.

Now this is where i'm getting stuck, as its IDE I had to do the IDE modifcation in TargetFilter.py file - which works fine, I can install it runs perfectly but I have no network devices detected in esxcfg-nics -l but everything else works fine.


If I then try booting with ACPI=OFF enabled, my network devices are shown in esxcfg but I get "PANIC: Failed to find HD boot partition" when it tries to boot up into manager, even though it had mounted the hard drive before hand and can see contents by logging into unsupported console mode and typing "ls"

Network device is: NetXtreme BCM5704 - but will only show when I've turned off apci.

The network card does have a deviceid - of: 1648 which appears to be in the list.

So is it in esxcfg-nics that you're able to see the nics with acpi set to off? Do you also see them with lspci -p (listed both with a vmnic number and a module)?

Are you running the most current BIOS?

Thanks for the reply,

Checking with the POST screen and Google it seems to be running the latest bios on the HP website (05505T03 - 26 Jul 2005)

If I boot with acpi enabled (minus acpi=off) and type lspci -p



which is correct as it is a dual nic interface, if I boot with acpi=off I get



and that they are listed in esxcfg-nics -l as



but I get "PANIC: Failed to find HD boot partition" - if I use "acpi=off"

So with apci on, do the NICs show up with lspci -p? Are both plugged in?

Yes they do.

But it gives me an hard drive error - even when everything has been mounted if I use acpi=off

I've been away for a bit. How have you made out with this?

We are fighting this same issue with our 5 X DL140 G1's. If you have any more tips or suggestions, I am willing to try them out for sure.

So if you run the install with acpi set to off, what PCI id does the storage controller come up with?

Ok. I tried to install with acpi=off and then our PS2 keyboard doesn't work. We are able to use a USB keyboard, but then the IDE "hack" doesn't work. It can't find a supported harddrive location either time. If we don't put acpi=off then the IDE hack works, but we don't have NICs in esxcfg-nics -l, we do have both listed still in lspci -p.

I am able to install without acpi turned off, but when I try to force it off after install, for some reason it isn't sticking after I restart after setting it as a kernel option in boot.cfg

I am probably doing something wrong. . .I thought I remembered the boot files were actually zipped somewhere so that editted file is probably getting overwritten. . .

Did you try setting it as an advanced option via the VI client?