I have an M55 model 8810 and couldnt get this to work its still not detecting the drives.

Ahh NM had to enable AHCI in the bios. and that did it.

I've noticed that alot of people have had issues installing ESXi to an HP DC7700.

To build upon Scottish Captain's work - for the above mentioned setup, it is entirely possible to install ESXi using the onboard SATA controller.

1) In BIOS, set the controller type to RAID (doesn't matter if you only have a single drive)
2) Use Scottish Captain's oem.tgz
3) When you receive the "cannot find disk" error, switch to the console and log in as root. issue the command "vmkloader_mod ahci", then continue the install as per normal.

ESXi will now find the SATA controller and also use it in SCSI emulation mode, allowing you to use the rest of your disk as vmfs3.

I've attached a differnt version of oem.tgz, as I initially created this for the purpose and tested successfully with it, although I have since tested Scottish Captain's and it works just as well.

This is tested only on a DC7700 SFF with ESXi u4.

Actually it's worse than that. I thought I'd be able to use the Update 3 iso and force an 'upgrade' to take me back down a version, but it hasn't worked, and I'm still without my SATA drives. Oh dear.

During the initial boot screen you can press shift+r to revert back to the prior firmware version. The install CD will only allow for a repair or fresh install.

See also this article - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/no_persistent_storage_after_upgrade.php

Actually Dave, I hadn't noticed the ESX3i title to this thread. I'm using ESX 3.5 installable, not 'i'. Sorry for causing confusion.

So far the only way I've found to get my system back is to reinstall over the top, reformatting partitions, but no the vmfs ones. Ho hum, lesson learned.

Can you tell me what bios version you have because I can't enable AHCI on my Lenovo M55