Thanks for the quick reply Kiddx. I went down to micro center and got a SI 3512 and was able to get past the no disk issue. It finished loading then on reboot it takes for ever just to start loading. It has been loading for like 40min and it is only on the "loading hypervisor" screen and 25 percent.

Do you have the same motherboard? Is there something I should change in the bios?

This thing is kicking my $ss! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I really didnt bother with the HCL. What a mistake.

I too, made the HCL mistake (not checking it).  My setup is the ASUS board with an AMD Phenom 9500, which I was never able to get ESXI to load.   I do have vmware server 2.0 under SUSE Linux running on the setup.  No issues, just blazing.

I have another cpu which has an older AMD 64bit 3500+ process, that ESXi loaded up with only a hitch with the IDE drive. I modified the install script to return IFACEE_ISCSI, when the IDE Drive is found. It then shows the drive in the list, and I chosed it as the drive of choice for install. It has been working great since.  It boots up very fast.

I have only two complaints about the whole matter:

1. ESXi works with the older processor but not the newer one?  That is insane, that it does not work with the newer one.

2. When installing ESXi, it requires that you have at least a WINDoz box with .NET installed to use the interface.  I am trying to get away from Windoz and all of the crap.  To get around this, I have VM with XP on the Phenom setup, that I connect to to access the older ESXi setup. Works great.  One day, we will be free . . . .

Thanks.

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Just a thought - Has anyone tried Update 4 to see if it resolves the microcode error / SATA drivers?

MCuzo,

I haven't tried the new BIOS... and since you say that update 4 is still giving the microcode issues, I think I'll just stick with update 2 for now. I'd suggest you do the same ...

I was able to load centos 5.2 64 bit on mine successfully.

We were able to use the ASUS M3A78-CM by disabling the CPU setting for C1E in the BIOS. (I've noticed there is a setting under Configuration -> Software ->Advanced Settings -> VMkernel -> Boot, an option called VMkernel.Boot.disableC1E, although I have not tried it.)

Also, please note this page with similar information: http://ultimatewhitebox.com/motherboard/148

Note that the on-board Realtek network driver does not work, you have

to find a supported network adapter (we got one of the Intel 1000 line). Also, we did not use the onboard RAID, as the docs for ESXi says

that onboard SATA RAID does not work or is unstable.

ETA:  Note that I got this behavior under both ESXi 3.x and 4, but only tried the fix under 4.  I imagine it would also work under 3.