I've done a lot of searching on this and found that this is a known issue. However the VMWare provided work around is to change the Scsi.CRTimeoutDuringBoot value to 10000. I have done this but it does not fix my issue.
I found this thread very helpful as it sounds like many others have this issue:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/279042?start=15&tstart=0
However it doesn't fully explain, or resolve, my issue. I have a very simple setup. I have a mobile lab that I use to demostrate ESX technologies. I had this all booting off a ESXi 4.0 USB stick and it worked fine. After upgrading to ESXi 4.1 its not stuck at "cbt loaded successfully". I do not have shared storage, I just have an internal SATA drive that is my datastore. So, ESXi resides on the USB stick and the SATA drive is the datastore. Nothing shared. If I unplug the SATA it boots ups (a bit slow but it boots). When I plug it back in, it just hangs there, I left it on this screen for hours and it never moves. I changed the value listed above and I get the same results.
I'd really like to demo ESXi 4.1 but apparently ESXi 4.0 is the only working version for my lab. Is there a solution to this problem yet?
-Gunnar
Gunnar Berger
http://www.gunnarberger.com
http://www.endusercomputing.com