Hello All,
Thanks to Dave for helping me solve the last piece of the puzzle. I tried editting the pci.xml file but it didn't work possibly because I wasn't sure of how many changes to make to the file. I finally have the server running ( Yipee!) last night after a week of sleepless nights. The following is my fix route.
1. Rebuilt the server with a support NIC and disabled the onboard NIC
2. Booted the server to the service console and logged on as Root using build password
3. Enabled remote login to ssh by editing the sshd_config file vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config (thanks to Blackforce)
4. Scrolled down and changed the line that says "PermitRootLogin" from "no" to "yes" and saved the file with :wq!
5. Restarted the SSHD service using "Service sshd restart" and was then able to access the server from a remote machine using winscp to copy files or edit files directly
6. Edited the /etc/vmware/pciid/sata_nv.xml file and replaced the last entry from 037f to 03f6, Also changed the controller name from MCP55 Nvidia... to MCP61 Nvidia... (Please note that steps 3 to 5 can be skipped as the file can be modified directly from the service console)
7. Ran the esxcfg-pciid
8. Restarted the server
9. Server comes up and mounts the root
A big thank you goes to everyone in this forum which I find very helpful. A big thank you goes to rpartmann for his wonderful script as well as pdewild, Dave.Mishchenko for his help as well as the list he is compiling (Please add Dell Inspiron 531 to your list) and lastly but not the least Blackforce. I love forums like this where you learn and I have sure picked up one or two things about Linux.
Regards,
Oluvido.