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patpro
Contributor
Contributor

ESXi 3.5 on Compact Flash card

Hello,

I'm playing around with ESXi for few days now. Currently I'm quite short on the hardware side: I only have one box with no hard drive. The motherboard is a Tyan Tiger i7520SD (S5365) with 2 Intel Xeon LV dual-core 1.66 GHz (Sossaman). http://www.tyan.com/product_board_detail.aspx?pid=415

I've installed ESXi on a USB thumbdrive: ESXi boots fine on the box, quite fast in fact, without any error, and I can configure network, root password, ...

I've made the same install on a Compact Flash card (Sandisk 2GB), and I've plugged this CF Card on the CF slot on the Tyan motherboard, and rebooted the box. ESXi starts ok, but fails to boot completely. After a while, it closes the yellow console and gets me back to the plain old text console that reads many error messages about USB boot partition that is nowhere to be found.

Is there any way to hack ESXi so that it can boot reliably from a CF card plugged into a dedicated CF slot?

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nick_couchman
Immortal
Immortal

I think the correct solution for this is to press Ctrl-O (as in the letter "o") as soon as ESXi starts booting (at the black screen). You should get a boot prompt at which point you can boot with the option "USBBOOT=FALSE" which should keep ESXi from trying to detect a USB boot partition on your CF card. There are more detailed instructions around the forum here somewhere on exactly how to do that.

Jackobli
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

After the boot-part which usually is BIOS based, the process is loading drivers for supported RAID, SATA and USB devices for completing.

Your cf-slot might not be supported.

Check the BIOS settings for the cf-slot (IDE, SATA, USB?), perhaps you can adjust it.

patpro
Contributor
Contributor

Nick, Jackobli, thank you.

I'm going to investigate the BIOS settings and try the ctrl-O at boot-time. I'll post updates here as soon as possible (don't have much time to play with ESXi now).

I'm not very confident I'm going to find something in the BIOS, I can't remember any available setting about the CF slot, and the motherboard documentation doesn't mention it.

The slot is hooked to the Intel® 6300ESB I/O Controller Hub, but I can't find anything on Intel's web site about compact flash connection to 6300ESB. It's probably ATA, as the 6300ESB supports 2 ATA devices, and the motherboard has only one IDE connector.

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Jackobli
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

I re-read your first posting and did remember problems I had with CF on another occasion.

CF is indeed IDE-based, but the pins on the card can signal removable or fixed mode.

Now there are also different sockets/readers, that can alter that signal.

So one card on one reader did play to removable blues, not letting me partition the CF (nor getting NTFS on it for Windows), while on another reader, I could do whatever I wanted.

I then bought a slightly more expensive CF with explicit fixed disk mode, like the TRANSCEND CompactFlash Card Industrial Ultra 100x 2.0GB (TS2GCF100I). This card did work well in all my installations.

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patpro
Contributor
Contributor

Thank you Jackobli for the info.

Tonight, I've tried to use the ctrl-o trick in order to add the USBBOOT=FALSE option. But I never got any chance to type this option. May be something is wrong in my setting, because I've tried ctrl-o many times without success. It looks like the black screen at boot time is not impressed by this key combo, and it switch to yellow interface pretty quickly, and eventually, the boot fail.

I took some time to play wit the BIOS too. As mentioned earlier, the CF slot is an IDE connector. It's current designation is "auto", and it does not look like it's recognized as "removable".

edit : after rebooting the box with "diagnostic screen" enabled, I've noticed the CF card is hooked as "IDE removable disk". If I can find some spare time this week end I'll try to change this to non-removable.

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Jackobli
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

Shoot, again a post to the wrong thread, hate my browser.

changed by Jackobli

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jrobgood
Contributor
Contributor

Shift-O not Ctrl-O

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