I have a SuperMicro system. The mother board is X5DPE BIOS V6.0, and has two Maxtor 40GB IDE hard drives installed. But I cannot install ESXi 3.5 U3 on it. The error message is "Unable to find a supported device to write ESX image to".
From tty1, I can see the Linux system has recognized Intel ICH chipset, and also found the two IDE drives. So what's the problem?
Try this method - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_install_to_IDE_drive/ESXi_install_to_IDE_drive.php. Is it an ICH7 controller?
I cannot access this site...
Not ICH 7, but ICH3-S.
X5DPE-G2: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/E7501/X5DPE-G2.cfm
Intel® E7501 chipset
MCH + ICH3-S + P64H2
You'll need to get the PCI id for the controller and compare it with this list - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/Hardware_support.php. Should the controller be driver compatible with the rest of the ICH family, then you might be able to install with a custom oem.tgz file. See also on the www.vm-help.com site about that and other storage controllers that should work for you.
I got a similar document from another website. And I've successfully installed ESXi. It works very well. Thx!