I have been working on an issue now for a little over a week and I need some expert advise. The PC I am using now used to be my production server and it ran esxi 5.0 since about late last year. It it now my test box. About 4 weeks ago I started running Windows 2008 R2 server on it exclusively to test our new Accouting system and decided last week to install ESXi 5.0 from CD. The CD would install without a hitch. At the end it would pop out the cd and reboot. The PC would reboot and after about 40 seconds it would say "Please insert bootable device - press any key when ready". I went into the BIOS initially and changed the Hard Drive (The only one installed) to be the first device. I got the same error as before. Here is what I have done to troubleshoot this:
I have tried:
1) Installing another hard drive
2) Resetting the BIOS
3) Flashing the BIOS to the latest update (Downgrading now fails)
4) Turning on or off UFCI
5) Turning on or off Hardware Virtualization (This does need to be turned on and it is now)
6) Other SATA ports on the motherboard
7) Wiping Track 0 using Samsung Ontrac Disk Manager. I have also done this with sysutils from kernel.org
😎 Reloading ESXi more than 10 times
Here is where things get interesting; I put in Hiren's Boot cd before I left work that day and shut the machine off. I went into work the next morning and turned the machine on and went about my business as usual. When I looked at the screen it had loaded ESXi 5. I was like "odd, I had problems with this earlier for a week and all of a sudden it's working?" I installed Windows 2008 Server R2 on a new vm and I was getting some windows update error (Time related). I took the CD out and rebooted the entire box. I got the same error as I did before; "Please insert bootable device - press any key when ready". I put the Hiren's cd back in and there is a menu when the pc boots the cd:
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Boot from Local Hard Drive
CD Menu
Load Mini Windows XP
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The motherboard is an Intel BOXDP35DPM
CPU is Q9550 Core 2 Quad 2.5
Ram is 8GB Corsair
1TB Samsung 1TB HD
Video is a NVIDIA 85xx
The only Network device that I have is a Rosewill card which has worked before in production. The one on the board is not recognized by ESXi 4.x or 5.x
I think I may have hosed the BIOS possibly since it won't boot up off the hard drive?
