The progress bar moves along for about 3-4 minutes and all looks good, then a line or two of random ASCII characters appear along the bottom of the screen, along with a 'boot:' prompt. This disappears after a further minute or two and returns back to the VMware ISO screen, asking you to press a key to start the install.. and round and round it goes.

I've checked the CD and it all seems OK..

EDIT: Problem solved. Turns out the BIOS setting for OS install had been enabled; Once disabled it finised the install OK. After the reboot, it went through the motions before stalling again for 10 minutes or so at the Starting screen, Loading ipmi_si_drv ...

Gave up waiting and pressed CTRL+ALT+D... just a split second before I pressed the Del key, it carried on the install process. Weird, it was like it was waiting for a keystroke or something to continue... anyways, all sorted and it's up and running.

I see you are able to run ESX 3i on Poweredge. May be you can assist me. I have 2 PE 2650 servers with "Broadcom Corporation NetXtrem BCM5703 Gigabit Network" cards. I am able to install esx 3.5 and ESX3i but cant seem to get these servers to communicate to network. My setup is explained here http://communities.vmware.com/message/1284782#1284782 .

Is it possible for you to assist me. I am at a stage that i might get rid of these server if they cant connect to network.

R@dho

Thanks

R@dho