No Operating System Installed - Dell Poweredge t105

[jsoldan]

I installed ESXi 4.0 update 1 successfully, but on boot I receive the "No Operating System Installed" message. Any thoughts/suggestions are much appreciated!

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

What kind of disks/ RAID controller do you have in your system?

On some RAID controllers with multiple LUNs or RAID sets configured, I saw an issue where ESXi did not enumerate the LUNs in the same order as the RAID controller, thus when installing ESXi on disk0 (the first disk presented by ESXi) I ended up with "no operating system". I didn't find the cause of this yet, however when I installed ESXi on the second disk it worked.

André

[jsoldan]

Andre, thanks much! I have two drives and re-installed on the second one and that did it!

[a_p_]

Just curious,

which RAID controller are you using?

André

Don't hesitate to mark correct and/or helpful answers.

[jsoldan]

Hmm...not sure. I haven't set up striping or anything, just the stock 2 hard drives. Dang, I am actually still having some issues. I am a lot further now, but it freezes on "Loading module sata_nv ..." when it's booting up after install on the VMWare gray and yellow screen. Any thoughts?

[a_p_]

I've seen a lot of posts about the internal SATA controllers. (google for "sata oem.tgz" or "esxi sata_nv")

You can try to install ESXi on an USB key to see if that works. However, if this is a production system I'd strongly recommend to get a supported HW RAID controller (supported by Dell as well as VMware) with BBU.

André