MSI K9N Neo V3
(MCP65) sata controller i think.
The first problem was to getting the nic on the motherboard to work with ESXi 4 and but now it can’t find sata controller.

What should do?

Do I have to edit the sata_nv.xml and put it in oem.tgz? And where could I find driver for this controller?

<device id="045d">
<vmware label="scsi">
<driver>sata_nv</driver>
</vmware>
<name>MCP65 SATA Controller</name>
</device>

Are you using ESX or ESXi? sata_nv.xml is for ESX only. ESXi uses simple.map to map devices to a driver.

Hello Dave Mishchenko
Wheel I´m using ESXi and i got it to work with MSI K9N Neo V3 mother board . uploading the oem.tgz this oem.tgz works with realtek r8186 and MCP65 sata controller.

oh, I thought it worked! but after the reboot only 1 sata drive is shown and the remainder are not in the picture. is there anyone who knows what I'm doing wrong.

Hello

I Have "MSI K9N Ultra" but it's chip set is different from your (MCP55) and it's works fine with ESX/ESXi 4.0 (both of them).
but I've same NIC as you.
did you ever try to boot your system from flash and then check the NIC and other Stuff.
I think booting from flash will give you a lot of space for working on this issue

Hello,
i'm about to buy Phenom 8450, update BIOS on my K9N Neo-F V3 and install ESXI 4.1. As this MB does not work with ESXi 4.x out of the box, but it is listed in Whitelist. Unfortunately, this is an only entry in List that does not have a link to definitive answer whether it is working or not. I see there were problems in detecting more than one hard disk when provided oem.tgz file is used. Did anyone manage to successfully run ESXi 4.x on this board? Anyway, i will post my results here after i get the CPU and (hopefully) install it on the board.

Ok, here is an update... Got CPU, and tried to install ESXi 4.1. I had to put SATA controller to IDE mode in order to ESXi detect my hard drive. If I put SATA in AHCI mode, ESXi can't see my hard disk. ESXi 4.1 complained about it can't find install image (i am using USB install). So I tried to install ESXi 4.0u1. Installation went OK. Boot was successful. However, when i tried to download vSphere client, the network connection to ESXi machine crashed. It seems NIC driver is not working properly Anyway, i will keep trying to find a solution. If anyone have any idea, i'm open for suggestions.

Try the driver here - viewtopic.php?f=12&p=7412#p7412

Hi Dave, thanks for your reply. I used Realtek driver 8.018 and followed method that user errichar explained in this thread: http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1272&p=9462#p9462. (Just copied r8168.o from ver. 8.018 over orginal r8168.o file in oem.tgz file). Network connection seems to be working ok, but i did not test it under heavy load. oem.tgz that i use is in attachment.